Big or small, all organisations have a duty of care for their employees, including a responsibility for regularly keeping employees up-to-date with their health and safety training.

As specialists in Health and Safety eLearning, we don’t stop at providing this training to companies – we’ve also made the administration involved much more streamlined.

When developing our Astute eLearning Platform, we focused on freeing up as much time as possible for our clients. Here are six health and safety questions made history thanks to Astute:

1. “Who needs to complete their annual refresher training this month?”

Management of annual training requirements often requires manually logging data on each employee, which must be routinely reviewed to determine the ongoing training needs of the organisation.

Too often, especially in smaller businesses, the responsible person uses tools such as spreadsheets to manage this process – undoubtedly costing them time which could have otherwise been spent proactively improving health and safety.

Astute’s automated refresher schedules enrol learners onto courses at intervals you specify, so once the learner is enrolled no further intervention is required other than watching course completions rise – and accidents decrease.

2. “Have you completed your mandatory health and safety training yet?”

After enrolling learners, you still need to ensure they complete courses by the required deadlines. Failure to do so increases the risk of injuries, and will not pass muster when it comes to audits.

Rather than someone having to manually chase learners to complete mandatory courses, Astute can automatically send reminders to learners as well as nominated people such as managers.

3. “Have you completed the health and safety training to be doing that activity?”

A significant proportion of a Health and Safety Officer’s time is spent monitoring the activities of employees to identify and reduce potential risks.

In the course of a day, they will often witness activities taking place that require special training, such as operating machinery or handling chemicals, causing them to question whether the necessary training has been taken.

However, it’s often impossible to confirm this until they return to their desk, which is not ideal while risky activities are taking place.

Astute makes learning data available in Health and Safety Officers’ pockets thanks to its responsive design so they can view training records and even enrol learners onto mandatory courses on-the-spot.

4. “What was the impact of the training delivered this year?”

A key health and safety requirement for any business is measuring the impact of training. When training records are maintained manually, drawing comparisons and useful insight can prove difficult.

Thanks to Astute’s in depth reporting capabilities, training can be directly compared with other related metrics, giving a clear indication of its impact.

5. “Which subject areas could benefit from further training interventions?”

Reducing incidents in the workplace by conducting risk assessments, identifying hazards and putting safety measures in place are core health and safety responsibilities for businesses.

eLearning doesn’t just act as a training tool – it can be used to measure understanding and give an indication of possible risk areas.

Using Astute’s reporting to view course assessment scores provides insight into those areas which may pose a potential risk, and therefore could benefit from a further training intervention.

6. “Which employees would make good health and safety champions in these subjects?”

In larger organisations, it’s important that the culture of health and safety reaches all members of staff, and a technique often used to achieve this is making individuals responsible for championing safe ways of working among their colleagues.

Selecting the right employees to fulfil these roles can make a big different in how safe culture of a workplace actually is – get it wrong, and it can undermine your training investment, especially if people in senior positions show disregard for safe working.

Examining assessment scores using Astute’s reporting dashboard can help identify those employees who excel at health and safety training, and would therefore make good health and safety champions – increasing the overall culture of health and safety in the workplace.