According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), more than 4 million employees suffer a serious job-related injury or illness every year. This comes at a substantial cost to both you and your clients. To minimize these risks, OSHA recommends, and often requires, companies to implement education courses into their workplace training.
Risk management is all about mitigating potential issues — after all, the more risks you can minimize, the more money your clients can save. One of the best ways to help your clients reduce their work-related risks is through education.
How Does Education Add Value?
It makes sense: Educated employees are less likely to make a decision that harms them, a co-worker, or a client.
Not only are training and education valuable for creating an efficient workforce, but they’re also helpful for keeping a company compliant. OSHA requires different types of training for different kinds of employees, and so do state and local governments. If your clients want to run their businesses headache-free, they should know how to stay compliant with safety training.
But labor laws are a moving target. For example, recent social movements continue to change how federal, state, and city governments see sexual harassment cases in the workplace. They have also changed how the general public views them. Helping your clients proactively train their staff to properly handle and avoid these situations will help keep employees happy, the public satisfied, and your company protected.
Who Needs Training?
Even if there isn’t a specific law in place, there are lots of positions that require additional training to avoid possible workplace injuries. What’s more, certain states might put additional requirements on what you must do to properly train your employees. For example, New York recently rolled out new requirements for sexual harassment prevention training that require that all employees to be trained on the topic and then retrained every year. They also require the training to be interactive.
When it comes to hazard communication, most states require that companies retrain their employees whenever a new hazardous chemical is introduced into the work environment. So as an employee’s job changes and grows, so does their employee education requirements.
These factors make educating and training employees more complicated than ever before. However, technology can help. With technology, you can make your workplace safety education more time- and cost-effective.
What Are the Benefits of Using Technology?
A learning management system, or LMS, is one way you can help your clients effectively train their employees. An LMS is typically a software or cloud-based service that offers interactive, online courses for employers. Below are just some of the benefits of an LMS:
- Save money without sacrificing quality. When most companies do employee training, the company has to spend money on a venue, food, and other resources for those employees who are being trained. Furthermore, they also have to deal with reduced productivity, since employees are being taken away from their day-to-day responsibilities.
- Reduce expenses. An LMS can significantly cut down on training costs. With a quality LMS, your clients can improve performance by managing resources, fulfilling compliance requirements, and showing real application, all while proving positive ROI.
As long as you have access to the right LMS that fits your clients’ needs, you can minimize risks and save your clients money.
What Makes a Good LMS?
There are a few key characteristics you should look for when evaluating LMS vendors, no matter your clients’ needs.
- Industry-specific courses – Your LMS should contain industry-specific courses that directly relate to the work your client does. For example, if your client has a warehouse, then the LMS should have courses designed for forklift operators.
- Ability to tailor course assignment – Your clients should have the ability to provision these courses to customize a training plan for specific employees or employee groups and their workplace needs.
- Reporting capabilities – A quality LMS should also include a mechanism to track employees’ progress and allow employers to run progress reports.
- Inclusion of state and local laws – Lastly, the courses included in an LMS should be specific to your clients’ geography and the differing location-based training requirements. It’s vital the training program helps your clients stay compliant to all laws — federal, state, and local.
Workplace safety laws are always changing, and an LMS can help you keep your clients’ costs down and their employees safe.
To learn more about workplace training programs, contact Zywave at [email protected]. To learn more about Zywave’s new LMS, Zywave Learning, visit www.zywave.com/client-cloud/zywave-learning.