The Importance of Maritime Safety Courses

In your shipyard, work never stops and your EHS team never stands still. Neither do your employees – and that’s part of the problem.

In all that hustle and bustle, it’s entirely too easy for someone to be careless and get hurt. It’s more common than you think. So common, in fact, that the maritime injury rate is five times the average for the overall U.S. workforce.

How do you protect your employees from harm? By sitting them down for maritime safety courses. Here are a few of the benefits of regular safety courses for your whole team.

Understanding Maritime Safety Rules and Responsibilities

Safety awareness is something all employees must carry at all times. But without the right maritime safety training to understand what they ought to be aware of, employees won’t know what to do.

Maritime safety courses are essential because they teach employees about the safety rules of the shipyard and their individual responsibilities in relation to the rules.

Better still, courses give EHS teams a chance to make the rules feel more personal. Instead of viewing rules as punitive, EHS teams can use courses to make the rules feel approachable to the average employee and stress their role in keeping their friends and colleagues safe so everyone can go home to their families.

Strengthening Your Safety Culture

This ties into the second benefit of maritime safety courses: strengthening your safety culture.

Safety culture is the way that employees and EHS teams think about safety, and it’s critical to the success of your EHS program. Put another way, safety culture makes all the difference between an employee saying nothing about a problem and an employee who takes active steps to protect their colleagues.

Safety culture bleeds through in the small details. Let’s say, for example, that every employee is required to attend maritime safety courses but management isn’t. Then, when employees are doing their jobs, they notice management engaging in unsafe behavior their training just warned against.

This sends a clear message to employees that not everyone is held to the same standards. It also shows that safety is not valued by the company and is instead weaponized against employees. In these conditions, employees won’t say anything if they see a problem.

Retaining Your Best Talent

But when maritime safety courses are used to strengthen your safety culture, you get another benefit: retaining your best talent.

When employees see that their managers care about them and take steps to deal with problems as soon as they arise, morale goes up. After all, if you’re watching their backs, it’s easier to walk into an unsafe situation every day.

This also means that employees are more likely to remain loyal to your company. They get more than a paycheck – they get an employer who values them as a person. And that investment is invaluable.

Improve Your Maritime Safety Courses

Ready to use maritime safety courses to your full advantage? If so, we’re ready to help, with training software designed to simplify the training process for employees and EHS managers alike.

Want to see it in action? Get in touch today to learn more.

Further Reading:

• Maritime Stewardship
• Improving Maritime Safety
• OSHA Maritime Safety Standards