Author: Charlie Patrick

5 Critical Considerations for Workplace First Aiders

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

When it comes to workplace safety, having an effective first aid strategy is non-negotiable. Ensuring that you can provide critical first aid quickly in the event of an emergency. However, this can only be achieved through well-structured workplace practices, with clear procedures and a strategy in place to maintain safety. Below are five key things to consider as a workplace first aider to build and maintain a strong first aid strategy:

1. Process and Procedures

The first and one of the most vital parts of your workplace first aid response is having a clear process. There must be a clear procedure in place so that once an incident has occurred, the appropriate aid can be provided as fast as possible. With staff knowing who and how to contact the nearest on-site first aiders quickly, to treat the situation immediately and gather any equipment required, such as your workplace first aid kits.

For more serious injuries where further medical assistance is required, it is important for staff to be clearly directed, either by the first responder or through following a set escalation plan. This may involve clearing the area of people and hazards, informing further medical staff and or the emergency services if required.

2. The Working Day

Frequently, organisations misjudge the different variables in the working day, with it not being uncommon for first aiders to only be present during “normal working hours”. Missing out on staff members who are active after-hours, such as cleaning staff or those working overtime. But it is crucial to consider the whole working day in its entirety, with trained first aiders covering the full range of hours your staff are present.

During quieter times, this requirement may vary, where you may only need a minimum of one appointed person present. However, this will be determined by the findings of your most recent risk assessment and the type of work completed at these times. Risk assessments also highlight any lone working or remote working practices, which would likely have a different agreement in place. These regulations apply to all workplaces, and employers must assess first aid needs based on the workforce, working hours, risk levels, alongside other factors.

3. High Risk Areas

First aiders need to be readily available at all times, and as a result, consideration should be taken for the layout and size of your workplace site. Adjusting for the varying risk levels across the site, taking extra care to target your first aid training and workplace first aid kits around high-risk areas.

For example, if you have heavy machinery, chemical storage, or a large warehouse section, the likelihood of injury is much higher than in your site’s office areas. Therefore, you should adjust your strategy around this to ensure that first aiders are on hand quickly.

4. First Aid Equipment

The contents of your workplace first aid kit/kits must be frequently maintained to ensure that they stay relevant to the risks, adequately stocked, and up to date. Scheduled maintenance can also verify your kits haven’t expired, checking that all the equipment is in working condition. The HSE guidance states that:

“Every employer should provide for each work site at least one first-aid container supplied with a sufficient quantity of first-aid materials suitable for the particular circumstances.”

The law does not give a fixed list of requirements, but guidance and standards such as the British standards – BS 8599 can help to identify suitable contents, alongside your assessment findings. If your site has unique dangers such as chemical use, burn risk or a remote location, your first aid kit should also reflect those hazards.

5. Records and Assessments

Finally, being proactive with your management is critical to preventing long-standing issues. Keeping logs and records of any maintenance, near misses or incidents is not only a legislative requirement, but also offers important insights into your workplace’s high-risk areas and trends.

Reviewing and analysing these trends can help you better target your first aid strategy, flagging the key high-risk areas and times of the day to your attention to safer protect your staff. Highlighting the importance of keeping consistent records and your knowledge up-to-date through regular refresher training.

Conclusion

The role of a workplace first aider is vital to the upkeep of your workplace safety and involves a lot more responsibility than knowing the essentials of first aid. How you structure, deliver and reflect on your plan has huge implications on your strategy’s success, with these considerations helping to format a comprehensive plan. Directly impacting much more than your first aid strategy, promoting confidence in your organisation’s health and safety culture, which has positive knock-on effects throughout your business.

Manual Handling Safety at Work

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

Whether you work in a warehouse, on a construction site, or in an office setting, manual handling will likely play a role in your everyday tasks, which can often appear harmless. However, when moving or lifting heavy objects incorrectly, it can pose a serious risk of injury, catching many people off guard.

As a result, every year the HSE consistently reports handling, lifting and carrying as the second most common cause of injury, accounting for approximately 15-20% of non-fatal injuries. Emphasising the need for strong manual handling procedures in the workplace.

What is Manual Handling?

Manual handling refers to any activity that involves transporting or supporting an object by hand or force. This includes lifting, lowering, pushing, pulling, or carrying items – making anything from moving a box of supplies to shifting machinery components included, regardless of the action being aided or not.

In manufacturing and construction roles, this is particularly present with loads often being heavy and irregularly shaped. Whilst in office environments, the risk is often presented through repetitive lifting or carrying, potentially causing injury over time.

The most common risks associated with manual handling include:

  • Long-term injuries – from repeated poor lifting techniques.
  • Muscle strains and sprains – often caused by repetition or awkward movements.
  • Fractures or dislocations – from slips and falls, or through dropping heavy loads.

How to Improve Your Manual Handling Safety

As it’s often the case, the best way to prevent heavy lifting injuries is by avoiding the task entirely. However, this becomes unavoidable with necessary tasks. But whilst not every lift can be avoided, many injuries are preventable by following safe working practices. Introducing the correct training to staff, avoiding repetitive tasks when fatigued and minimising the need for manual handling where possible, with the correct aids provided when they are needed.

But for your necessary tasks, here’s what’s recommended to mitigate the hazards and improve your manual handling safety:

1. Assess the Situation

When the situation arises, the first and most crucial step is to take a moment to assess the task. Looking for any way to simplify the movement and reduce the associated risks. That could mean splitting up the objects to reduce the weight and size or considering the shape of the load to make it easier to handle.

During this step, you should also be identifying any potential hazards, from uneven floors & wet surfaces to obstacles in your path that could make moving the object unsafe. Here you should also consider if you are confident in moving the load safely, particularly if it is heavy, you should look for assistance either mechanically or from another staff member.

2. Preparing Ahead

With the risks identified, planning out your route and getting any aids is the next key step to safe manual handling. For your longer routes, check your route in advance, removing any trip hazards and avoiding any slippery or busy walkways, whilst making sure there is adequate lighting throughout. Make sure you know exactly where you are going and that the destination is ready and clear.

Then, if it’s necessary, gather any lifting aids you might require, from trolleys to straps and ask for the help of a colleague if the load is particularly heavy, awkward, or unevenly balanced. Breaking down any heavy or bulky items into smaller loads where possible, as multiple lighter trips help to reduce the chance of injury.

3. Completing the Lift Safely

Now with all the preparation in place, carry out your plan in the safest way possible. Putting to use any mechanical aids to minimise stress through manual force. If lifting by hand, keep the load close to your body’s centre of gravity, maintaining a straight back by bending at the knees. Being sure to keep a strong grip, adjusting it if needed, avoiding any twisting while you are carrying the object.

Here, it is also important to keep holding time to a minimum, sticking to your planned route to get there safely and quickly, regularly setting the load down if you need to rest.

Conclusion

The cost of manual handling injuries can go much further than just a few lost working days. Posing a threat to your organisation’s safety and causing long-term health problems. So be sure to invest in the relevant training of your staff and encourage the use of ergonomic lifting aids to keep your staff safe and aware of the risks. Further helping to build a positive safety culture in your organisation to maintain a safer workplace and upkeep your manual handling safety.

5 Things Every Workplace Risk Assessment Should Include

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

Risk assessments play a vital role in keeping your workplace safe and are an essential pillar of an effective health and safety strategy, whichever industry you are in. Identifying and managing your workplace risks regularly enables you to protect your employees by mitigating the hazards and supplying the necessary training, whilst also ensuring you remain compliant. However, many risk assessments fall short due to missing or skimming past some of the most crucial elements.

So, to help you strengthen your processes, here are five essential components every workplace risk assessment should include.

1. Clear Identification of Hazards

The first step of any risk assessment is to thoroughly identify all the potential hazards across the workplace. This includes all physical, ergonomic, or long-term hazards, many which may not be immediately obvious. This creates a clear outlay of the risks, so that you can work towards a plan to mitigate them effectively.

During your assessments, you should also consider the impact of any changes occurring throughout your workday, including any lighting, weather, personnel or processes that may differ. Reviewing your incident reports regularly can also help reveal common health and safety risks and failings.

2. Who is at risk?

When working towards achieving safer workplace practices, understanding who might be affected by each hazard is crucial in order to pinpoint how to best protect the individuals. This includes not only employees but also contractors, visitors, and even members of the public – depending on your workplace layout and operations.

This allows you to adjust the processes according to their level of experience and knowledge via a range of techniques, whether that be improving your staff training, moving staff around, or even changing the processes entirely. This also opens up the opportunity to spot developing patterns, thereby potentially preventing any individuals from being overexposed to hazards.

3. Implementing Control Measures

With the vulnerabilities now identified, you must evaluate the level of risk each hazard presents and identify all existing control measures. Commonly this can be done through a rating system such as a risk matrix/register, to easily prioritise the most dangerous areas. Determine if the control measures are adequate or if further action is required to bolster your health and safety practices to reduce the risks.

In this step, it is also crucial to consider how hazards may overlap and interact with each other, as often long-term risks and fatigue can increase the chances of a health and safety failing.

When implementing mitigation techniques, it is important to remember the hierarchy of controls, providing a guide to the most effective strategies:

  • Elimination – Removing the hazard completely
  • Substitution – Replacing the process or hazard with a safer alternative
  • Engineering Controls – Changing the systems to minimise risk exposure
  • Administrative Controls – Changing practices to reduce the potential risk
  • PPE – Directly protecting the individual from the risk

4. Employee Involvement and Consultation

No one knows your workplace quite like your staff, as interacting with different parts of their working environment day in day out gives them a unique perspective and understanding of potential health and safety issues and concerns. Co-operating with your employees during a risk assessment is crucial to revealing the overall picture, helping you be aware of hazards that may have otherwise gone unnoticed whilst also enhancing your health and safety culture – making staff feel heard and valued.

During this step, it is also vital that you ensure all staff are up to date with the latest emergency plans and processes to verify their safety and others in the event of an emergency.

5. Introducing a Review Schedule and Documenting

Finally, workplace risk assessments are not one-off exercises. They should be living documents, updated and reviewed whenever there are changes in procedures, equipment or personnel, with significant changes demanding a full re-assessment. With this in mind, scheduled review intervals are essential to upkeep a safe workplace. Depending on your working environment and the risks involved these timescales can fluctuate, being unique to your organisation, generally sitting between every quarter to biannual reviews

On top of a regular review cycle, make sure you are thoroughly documenting your finding. This is not only good practice, but it’s a legal requirement across the UK. A clear and structured record shows that the risk assessment was completed properly and outlines who is responsible for actions and their deadlines.

Documenting and scheduling reviews is often made easier through the use of standardised templates, helping your reviews to meet the same criteria. This can be further aided by risk assessment software to maintain consistency and keep within deadlines.

Conclusion

Workplace risk assessments are a fundamental part of your health and safety management, but their requirements can be blurry, so completing them correctly is vital to ensure the safety of your work premises. By ensuring your assessment includes these five key elements, you will create a strong foundation for a safer and more compliant workplace. Whilst the inclusion of staff into your practices will improve your workplace’s safety culture, ultimately creating a much safer working environment for everyone.

Health and Safety Considerations for Lone Working

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

Lone working is when employees work in isolation without direct supervision, and is increasingly common in various industries. But, whilst it offers more flexibility and autonomy for workers, it also presents a unique set of health and safety challenges.

Here is a comprehensive guide to understanding and addressing these considerations:

Workman Climbing a ladder whilst working alone outside.

Risk Assessment

Conducting a thorough risk assessment is a crucial first step in ensuring the safety of lone workers. Identifying all potential hazards such as equipment malfunction, health emergencies, or even the risk of violence. Doing so, Enables you to assess the severity of these risks and prioritise them to develop strategies to effectively eliminate them, creating a safer work environment.

Training and Awareness

To prepare individuals for lone working, you must first ensure that they have thorough training on the correct safety procedures, emergency responses, and the proper use of any equipment they will be using to properly carry out their job.

After following a comprehensive training plan, lone workers should be able to recognise potential hazards and know how to respond effectively. Afterwards, regular refresher training can help to keep their safety knowledge up-to-date, reminding them of the potential risks they may face.

Smartlog Laptop on the desk

Access to Communication

When someone is working on their own, communication is extremely important. It is crucial to establish robust communication systems, including regular check-ins by phone (or other instant communication devices), GPS tracking, or even emergency alert systems. Ensuring that lone workers can quickly and easily call for help in the event of an emergency is crucial to mitigating the risks.

Emergency Procedures

In more detail, you should clearly define emergency procedures which are tailored to lone working scenarios. This includes knowing who to contact, how to access emergency services, and the location of first aid kits. Having a clearly established and well-practiced emergency plan can make all the difference in a critical situation.

A pile of evacuation plans and fire alarms.

A Safe Working Environment

Ensure the working environment is safe and secure for lone workers. This includes keeping the workplace brightly lit, maintaining secure access points, and confirming all vehicles and work equipment are in good working condition. Regular inspections and maintenance can prevent breakdowns or accidents, and create a safer workplace.

Health and Psychological Support

You should keep on top of the health and well-being of lone workers, especially those in physically or mentally demanding roles. Often, lone working can lead to feelings of isolation or stress, and providing access to psychological support, such as counselling services or peer support groups, can help address and prevent these issues.

Encouraging regular social interaction, even if virtual, can also reduce feelings of isolation. For physical wellbeing, regular health check-ups can identify potential issues before they develop into anything more serious.

Different health metric symbols, signifying the importance of lone working support.

You should always ensure that you are fully compliant with health and safety regulations. This includes understanding your legal obligations as an employer, keeping up with all changes in legislation, and ensuring that all safety measures meet or exceed regulatory standards.

Remember, non-compliance can both jeopardise worker safety and lead to serious legal repercussions.

Encouraging Feedback

You should encourage regular feedback from lone workers to identify any areas of concern. Not only will this help them feel valued, but it will allow you to implement any improvements based on their experiences, helping to create a safer work environment. Also, remember to regularly review and update safety protocols to ensure that they remain effective.

By addressing all these health and safety considerations, you can ultimately create a safer and more supportive environment for lone workers in your organisation. Prioritising their wellbeing not only enhances productivity, but also demonstrates a clear commitment to their overall safety and security.

Winter Safety: Keeping Your Workplace Safe

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

With Winter fast approaching, how is the unpredictable weather impacting your workplace safety? From an increase in slips and trips from icy walkways to a lack of focus caused by inadequate clothing in the cold, keeping your employees safe this winter can be challenging.

It is crucial to plan ahead and foresee the potential risks that can impact your working safety, therefore we will now dive into some of the key things to look out for to ensure your workplace’s safety this winter.

Close up of a half gritted walkway, with snow on the righthand side and a person walking on the left.

Visibility

With darker and longer nights becoming the norm, it is vital that you ensure good visibility around your workplace. This will help you to avoid any slips and trips from poor lighting, or injuries from not knowing someone else is around.

So to avoid these situations, keep your site well-lit (especially around walkways), so people can easily identify any hazards in their paths, and also introduce high-visibility clothing if needed, to ensure that everyone can be seen – this is particularly important when working with machinery.

But also make sure you don’t overlook low-traffic areas, as often these can be the most dangerous. And if you need to, shadow colleagues to ensure that you are keeping your workforce safe throughout the day.

Heavy rain in the night sky lit up by a floodlight.

Changing Weather

In winter the weather is often unpredictable, making it challenging to upkeep a safe workplace, quickly jumping between icy winds, sudden downpours and freezing temperatures. Therefore, ensure that you evaluate the working environment carefully before carrying out any tasks. Consider whether the conditions and your personnel’s experience are adequate to safely complete the tasks at hand, or if there are better times to take on those riskier tasks eg. such as working at heights or during cold nights.

To combat the rainy weather, it is also critical to introduce anti-slip flooring, particularly around doorways as wet floors are often a recipe for slips, regardless of the wider conditions.

Ice and Dropping Temperatures

Arguably the most dangerous risk that Winter brings to your safety is ice and sub-zero temperatures, which quickly develop into new hazards and risks across your workplace. If these are not correctly dealt with, they can harm your working safety. However, one of the most effective ways of dealing with the dropping temperatures is through pre-emptive action.

During the colder months, staying on top of the upcoming weather forecast is crucial to safely planning out what your workplace needs in order to keep safe this Winter. So when low temperatures are forecast, make sure to grit your walkways the day before and ensure that all of your walkways are as clean and dry as possible. This gives you the best chance to avoid any icy or slippery floors, helping you fight back against any slips and trips – which is the leading cause of workplace injury.

Another crucial step to keeping your employees safe is ensuring that they are well-dressed to deal with the temperatures, especially when working for long periods outside. This can be done by encouraging them to keep warm and take regular breaks inside when it is especially cold.

Finally, when dealing with ice and snow you should encourage people to actively think about their winter safety. Whether it’s avoiding shortcuts off the gritted pathways, planning ahead to prevent rushing around, or even considering the best times for each task, to keep them as safe as possible.

An example of poor winter safety precautions where a man has slipped on an icy pathway.

Communication

But the final, most powerful tool you have when it comes to health and safety is communication. Regularly asking your employees, or even shadowing them for a while will potentially give you a new perspective on the safety of your workplace. Ensuring that they feel safe and at a comfortable temperature throughout the day is also crucial to workplace morale and safety; helping them stay focused and always remain health and safety conscious.

To conclude, keeping your staff safe throughout the winter should be critical to all businesses. Although it does come with its unique set of challenges, with the correct pre-planning and monitoring, these actions will significantly improve your workplace safety, aiding your Risk Assessments and checks to ensure you keep your employees safe this Winter.

The Importance of PPE in Your Workplace

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

PPE plays a vital role in keeping people safe at work by protecting the individual from risks that can’t be eliminated through standard risk mitigation. However, this makes it crucial to understand when and where it is needed to ensure your organisation’s health and safety practices are up to standard. So, let’s dive into it.

A safety helmet demonstrating an example of PPE.

What is PPE?

First, let’s cover the basics: Personal Protective Equipment –  often referred to as PPE, is all equipment intended to be used by a person at work to protect them from the risks present in their working environment.

This includes everything protecting you from hazards, such as high-vis clothing for conditions with poor visibility, to harnesses protecting you when working at height; no matter the severity of the risks it’s protecting you from.

When must PPE be used?

PPE must be used to ensure that any remaining risks/hazards, identified in your risk assessments, are adequately controlled, and should only be used when the risks cannot be eliminated by other means. This is due to the other means of risk mitigation being safer and more effective.

If you can avoid or eliminate the risks directly, this creates a much safer environment than applying protective measures; making PPE most suitable as a ‘last resort’ option. This is also reinforced by the HSE placing it last in its hierarchy of controls:

“Elimination – physically remove the hazard

Substitution – replace the hazard

Engineering controls – isolate people from the hazard

Administrative controls – change the way people work

PPE – protect the worker with personal protective equipment”

This makes the use of PPE necessary in high-risk environments such as construction sites, where for example, falling objects and moving machinery can’t be eliminated as a risk, making a hard hat, high-vis clothing and steel-capped shoes the minimum requirement.

A variety of PPE displayed out on a table, showing protective boots, gloves, ear protection, safety glasses, a hard hat and a high-vis jacket.

What does the legislation say?

The use of PPE is covered in many different laws and regulations, however the main two safety acts are the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (HSWA), and the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992 (PPER).

The HSWA prioritises creating a safe environment for your staff with risk mitigation and training, highlighting your duty to provide the necessary equipment and the training/knowledge to achieve this. Whilst the PPER goes into more detail with the requirements:

“Every employer shall ensure that suitable personal protective equipment is provided to his employees who may be exposed to a risk to their health or safety while at work except where and to the extent that such risk has been adequately controlled by other means which are equally or more effective.” – PPER 4.1

This regulation specifies the employers’ duty to provide suitable PPE to protect the employees when any risks are unavoidable and pose a present health and safety hazard.

However, it is crucial for the equipment to be in good working condition, and critical that the staff is trained to safely assess and use the provided equipment. This is because misuse of PPE results in thousands of injuries across the UK every year.

Workers having a safety debrief, covering the importance of PPE usage.

The Importance of PPE

PPE is the crucial last step in your organisation’s health and safety, protecting from the remaining hazards in your workplace to ensure that your staff remain safe. With the right training and maintenance, PPE provides effective protection to help prevent incidents and encourage a safer working environment.

How To Prevent The Most Common Workplace Hazards

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

The working environment is constantly evolving, making it challenging to keep on top of health and safety. But with reports showing that almost 4 million working days are lost because of injuries every year in the UK, the presence of these common workplace hazards are clear.

Although every workplace has its own unique set of hazards, here are the most common workplace hazards that are likely lurking in your environment.

Slips, Trips and Falls

Accounting for almost a third (32%) of all injuries in 2023, slips, trips and falls are the most common cause of workplace injury in the UK, despite being one of the simpler hazards to spot and prevent.

One of the key preventative measures is ensuring good visibility. You should make sure that everyone can clearly see their path ahead, allowing them to double-check for any hazards eg. wet surfaces, objects in the way, uneven ground or steps. Areas should also be well-lit with walkways kept clear and dry, therefore ensuring that the path ahead can be seen.

It is also important to highlight any ‘problem areas’ to alert others to be more attentive. Some common methods to highlight these areas are:

  • Signs – ‘Wet floor’ signs or ‘Caution when wet’ signs are some of the most widely used options.
  • Highlighting steps – often bright grip tape is placed on ledges to highlight the elevation change to prevent trips.
  • Slip-resistant flooring – Commonly placed near entrances to stop wet walkways from becoming a hazard.
Safety tape on a staircase.

Fire Hazards

Fires remain a persistent and common hazard to businesses across the country, with a reported 22,000 workplace fires every year. To combat this, regular employee training is a necessity, and this can be done as a group session or online via a fire safety training course. Afterwards, taking this training periodically will refresh your employees’ knowledge.

It is also necessary to ensure that countermeasures are accounted for in case of a fire breaking out. This means checking your fire alarms and fire extinguishers regularly for damage, ensuring they are unobstructed and functional. Additionally, an evacuation plan should be in place, ensuring that everybody has a safe route out of the building – with any assistance necessary if needed.

Man inspecting a fire extinguisher, to monitor the common workplace hazard

Electrical Hazards

Often forgotten, electrical hazards can pose a huge risk to your workplace safety if not regularly maintained. Shorting out circuits could potentially cause safety systems to fail, thereby increasing the risk of fires.

Simple yet regular checks are often the best way to keep on top of electrical risks, with formal maintenance and inspections carried out by a professional when necessary. Some key areas to check regularly are:

  • Cables – are they all intact and insulated correctly, with no signs of damage?
  • Outlets – are they in good condition and properly grounded?
  • Overloading – are the outlets overloaded?
Overloaded electrical outlet creating an electrical hazard

Ergonomic Hazards

Ergonomics often get disregarded when it comes to health and safety, but with almost half a million workers suffering from work-related musculoskeletal disorders every year in the UK, their importance is clear. Despite this high prevalence, it is one of the easier risks to eliminate.

Increasing awareness is the most common method to mitigate the hazards in the workplace, as employees can take more responsibility of their own workspace and adjust it accordingly. The best way to raise awareness among your staff is through training. A short eLearning course can effectively cover everything they need to know, and also gives you a record of when that was last completed.

Following on from the training, staff will then need to alter their workspaces to suit. This will involve adjusting everything from screen height for office workers to introducing equipment for heavy lifting for the more active sectors. Accommodating these changes will eliminate the ergonomic hazards, helping you prevent any injuries occurring because of poor ergonomics.

Poor ergonomics due to poor workplace hazard management

By identifying and eliminating these common workplace hazards, it can massively benefit both your business and your employees. This will help you to create a much safer and more efficient working environment, which will boost not only your business’s productivity but also its reputation. These implementations can all take place whilst also improving your staff’s morale and well-being by taking the ‘edge’ off your working environment; making it feel safer, whilst reducing staff injury and ill-health.

Sources:

HSE (2023) ‘Health and Safety at work statistics’. Available at: https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overview.htm (Accessed: 27/06/2024)

Dorset Fire Protection (2023) ‘Common Causes of Workplace Fires’. Available at: https://dorsetfireprotection.co.uk/common-causes-workplace-fires/ (Accessed: 27/06/2024)

How To Build An Online Training Course

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

Building an online training course can be a fantastic way to deliver training to your staff, allowing you to personalise and customise the learning experience, to ensure that all users take in all necessary information. However, that being said it is crucial to prepare properly before creating any eLearning course, to ensure that your courses deliver the required lessons. As often jumping straight into the creation phase, will result in missing content and ultimately a lower-quality course.

A user learning how to build an online training course

1. Course Objectives

Establishing what you want to teach is the first and the most crucial aspect of building an eLearning course. This ensures that the course covers all the crucial lessons that you need to teach, whilst allowing you to plan out how to best achieve this.

Start by setting the objectives of the course, these don’t have to be listed at the start of the course, but it can be helpful to establish to the learners what the key takeaways are. So what are the key lessons you are covering?

  • Filling in gaps of knowledge?
  • Teaching a user how to use something?
  • Where are health and safety measures required?
  • Site specific considerations/information?

2. Research

Research is the next important step in creating your own eLearning course. As before you start to piece together your course, you need to make sure that what you are teaching is correct. This will ensure that you fully understand the course content and iron out any mistakes/gaps in your knowledge to make sure that your training is as high quality as possible.

This step may not be necessary depending on the course content, so use your discretion. However, even if you are experienced in the subject at hand, finding credible sources to back up your statements only adds to the validity of your course, whilst ensuring that your learners can trust what they’re being taught.

A magnifying glass on a keyboard symbolising research

3. Audience and Format

When building your own online training course it provides an unmatched opportunity to tailor the content and format to your audience. This will also help condense the course, helping you to avoid being that dreaded training course that is too drawn out for its own good. So factoring in your audience and altering the content and format to suit, is key to avoiding this and build a high-quality condensed training course.

This will also allow you to change the format to best suit their training needs. For example, if your online training course is primarily for an experienced workforce, then you can tailor the content to be more ‘recap-focused’, to keep their training as concise and engaging as possible. However this therefore wouldn’t be as suitable for new starters, potentially lacking the detail required to fill in any gaps, highlighting why considering your course audience is crucial to ensuring that it delivers on the objectives.

A user learning from a elearning course

4. Course Outline

Once you have your foundations of the content, it is key to plan out an outline for your course. This will help you determine the best way to deliver the lessons to get your point across.

Start out by placing the key slides into your Training Course Creator tool and reorder them until they sit logically – covering all the key points in the order in which they should be covered. This will ensure that your course doesn’t bounce between topics to often and keeps the learning organised into digestible sections.

5. Content

Once you have your key slides in order, its now time to fill out the bulk of the course. This is where you compile all of the previous steps and complete the course with all of the relevant content.

Be sure to keep this in-line with your audience and formatted to suit, to create the best learning experience. Attaching any media, information sources and site-specific knowledge where necessary. This will also help keep the course engaging, which is critical to creating the best learning environment.

6. Quiz Questions and Types (Knowledge Checks)

With the bulk of the online training course now built, you can now test your learner’s knowledge. This is crucial to ensure that they have learnt the course content and meet the level of knowledge required to pass the course.

There are many ways in which questions can be integrated into the course, so make sure to consider the options to find the most appropriate fit. This means considering:

  • How many questions are needed?
  • How are the questions going to be spaced out?
    • Is one big block appropriate?
    • Do you space them out evenly?
    • Are short ‘Knowledge Checks’ the best fit?
  • What question types are you using?
    • Multiple choice
    • Drag and Drop
    • Sortable lists
  • What are the key topics to test for?
Puzzle question piece

7. Quality Checks

Finally, you need to check the quality of the course, ensuring that it works as intended, with no errors throughout the course, whether that is a weird glitch in the test questions or certificates not being awarded properly. This is also where you can refer back to the course objectives you set in the earlier steps, ensuring that the training delivers on its goals and has no content missing or being skimmed over.

During this step it is also important to check for any grammatical or spelling errors as well as formatting errors – are the pictures high quality? Are linked videos running smoothly? Is there any clipping or weird text placement?

Conclusion

Overall, there are many steps that go into the creation, research and formatting of an engaging high-quality training course. But these steps are crucial to ensuring the course lives up to the many benefits of custom courses and make it worth the added effort. When done correctly creating an eLearning course provides a unique learning opportunity and will enhance your training standard.

Introducing ‘Help Desk’ – our latest Smartlog® module

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

We are pleased to announce the release of a new Help Desk facility in Smartlog®.

The new help desk module allows your users to raise tickets regarding any premises issues in your
organisation. Live tickets can be tracked, updated and then resolved within Smartlog and through
immediate email notifications – including all related costs and time spent fixing the issue.

Help Desk provides you with the following abilities:

Create custom ticket categories
Any user can raise a ticket, and custom categories can be created. All created tickets are
automatically categorised and can be immediately assigned to the responsible user to resolve.

Set time-bound priority levels
You can set custom priority levels for your tickets, determining exactly the length of time the ticket requires to be resolved. This enables your SLAs with your contractors to be automatically built-in,
for example.

Keep a track of all costs
You can input and track all costs related to a ticket, and you can also track the exact time spent
resolving the ticket. Also, anyone working on the ticket can update it anytime with their detailed
costs.

Live email updates
From the raising of a ticket, during its resolution, and to its closing, email notifications are sent to
all users involved in the ticket to keep everyone updated on exactly what is going on.

This module is completely free to all our customers who use the full version of Smartlog. and is
immediately available for Company Admins to use.

To book a demo of ‘Help Desk’ for your organisation or to request more information about Smartlog, visit our contact page or send us your query to info@safesmart.co.uk

The Benefits of eLearning

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

Training is a crucial part of any business’s health and safety, with it being critical to ensuring that everyone knows the dos and don’ts within their workplace – everything from Asbestos Awareness to Fire Safety courses. However, managing training can often be a time-consuming and stressful task, and businesses often don’t take the time to consider other options. So here are the 5 benefits of eLearning to help you streamline your training and widen your perspective.

eLearning graphic of a laptop wearing a graduate hat.

Flexible Learning

One of the advantages of eLearning is its flexibility in both location and timing. Gone are the days of trying to schedule training with everyone’s calendars to make sure they can all attend one session at a set location.

eLearning allows you to bypass this and get your staff to learn at a time which suits them. Whether that’s on their phone/tablet as they are on the go or in the office on their computer, online training is completely flexible, all you need is a device and internet access.

Seamless Management

Managing training can be challenging and time intensive, lining up schedules, organising the training and tracking who has done what and when. But eLearning can streamline this process, with fast insights into your organisation’s training.

With the ability to quickly view who has completed their courses and what’s overdue and upcoming, our eLearning module will also ensure that no training is missed. With weekly email reminders for overdue training and auto-assign features, you can ensure that your training doesn’t go past its expiry date.

Smartlog's eLearning laptop, featuring different courses.

Personalised Learning

Another great benefit of eLearning comes from the individual aspects of it, allowing for personalised and unique learning. From choosing what to assign to everybody individually to tailoring their courses specifically to their department/site using a Training Course Creator tool.

Being digital, eLearning also provides a unique learning opportunity, allowing you to use videos and graphics easily to learn and even interactive content, which can provide immediate feedback to the user, helping them learn faster.

Reduced Costs

In-Person training is expensive with many factors affecting the price, from the trainers’ day rate, the travel costs involved, time lost and even the building costs for the room.

However, due to the nature of online training, you can cut these costs down by going digital, having no travel or hire costs and having training for unlimited users all for one price. Making eLearning a lot more affordable for businesses especially when the change in admin work is accounted for.

Reducing the cost of training image.

Bite-sized Learning

Splitting up training time is crucial to remain focussed and ensure the best learning environment. This is especially important when you are covering serious topics as is normally found within workplace training.

This benefits eLearning greatly as you can easily split up your training into bite-sized chunks, either one course at a time or pausing halfway through to come back to it later.

Overall considering the swap to eLearning can be beneficial for most businesses, helping you to streamline your training process whilst reducing costs, removing the hassle, and improving your staff’s learning experience.

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