Overview
SafetyWallet has thousands of members in South Africa and serves as a focal point for both supporting and assisting organizations in the achievement of Health and Safety compliance with services spread over a diverse range of industries.
Organizations that join SafetyWallet, and subsequently become members, have SafetyWallet’s support every step of the way with the aim of aiding industries and commerce in the creation of safer and healthier working environments.
Members are both supported and rewarded in four distinctive components of Health and Safety in both industry and commerce:
- Health and Safety Training
- Health and Safety Programmes
- Health and Safety Compliance Grading Audits, and
- Member Advertising.
When focussing specifically on the provision of training, SafetyWallet, in partnership with MAKROSAFE, provides its members with the highest quality of health and safety training.
The training which is provided is aligned with the unit standards and the curriculum of SAQA and accredit as well as endorsed with DoEL, HWSeta, and SAIOSH.
The support that members can expect from a SafetyWallet support manager in training includes, but is not limited to:
- An analysis of training requirements.
- Dedicated Skills Development Facilitator, or SDF.
- Annual Workplace Skills Plan, or WSP.
- Skills Development Levy, or SDL, Requirements, and more.
In addition, the SafetyWallet platform offers the following training solutions:
- E-Learning which consists of unlimited E-Learning training with over 41 training courses, of which 36 are dedicated specifically towards Health and Safety with the benefit that E-Learning courses are free of charge to members.
- Accredited E-Learning which consists of E-Learning and Assessment on all E-Learning Accredited Training and Learnerships, and more.
Why will the Health and Safety E-Learning training which SafetyWallet provides aid in Health and Safety Compliance?
Health and Safety compliance affects all organisations and it is applicable to each employee within each organisation. It is an employee welfare issue as well as a legal requirement which has implications for a business’ performance and productivity.
The norm associated with Health and Safety Training
The purpose of training when considering it as a practical and mandated process is ensuring that Health and Safety training sparks awareness, prevents accidents, and meets legal requirements.
There are organisations, such as SafetyWallet, which offers help in the creation of a training programme, and further offers support to the Health and Safety department in organisations in implementing and maintaining programmes.
Often compliance training may become ineffective and minimally adequate that raises the question of how effective trading can be provided without reminding employees about their obligations but instead instils a culture of Health and Safety applied to everyday work life.
Source: SA Shares
Making training a process
One of the issues concerning Health and Safety training is that it is often simply reactive and involves the process where legislation is handed down, a training event organised, and employees are made aware of the changes and informed of their responsibilities.
When approaching training in this manner, it often proves to be ineffective and therefore compliance cannot always be ensured.
To become effective, training must be a continuous process and not a once-off event that occurs after an incident has occurred, or only when there are changes in legislation.
Training needs to be a part of a Health and Safety Programme, such as provided by SafetyWallet which not only aids organizations, but rewards members generously, thus inspiring for training to become a process instead of a chore.
When considering that learners have access to a world of information when and where they needed, this advantage must be harnessed and utilized as a way of providing consistent and effective training by making use of SafetyWallet’s E-Learning courses.
Increased access
The effectiveness of training depends on the access provided to it and to ensure this, training needs to go beyond that which is provided in the classroom.
This can easily be done through SafetyWallet and its adequate provision of Health and Safety E-Learning courses as learners can have access to such information as and when they need it as part of their normal working practice.
By harnessing the power of technology, employers can use it to raise awareness and ensure the effectiveness of training by something as simple as enabling mobile notifications that informs employees of changes, updates, or refresher training that they need to be aware of.
Employee motivation
Ensuring access to training material is merely a part of the solution in ensuring the effectiveness of Health and Safety training. It also requires motivated and actively involved learners, and not only during training sessions.
As part of the creation of a Health and Safety Culture, it is imperative that the culture spreads through the entire organization and that it is applied not only to the conduct of employees, but also to the employee’s understanding on a wider scale beyond work.
Health and Safety training must serve the purpose of making employees aware of their surroundings outside of the workplace as well to ensure that the Health and Safety Culture becomes instilled in each employee as a way of life.
Ensuring the relevance of Health and Safety Training
Employee motivation can be enhanced by being relevant and credible despite the training being focusses on a specific organization and its specific workplace environment. Regulations can often be regarded as an abstract applied holistically only.
It is vital that each component of the organization is considered essential and thus training becomes good working practice which can be applied to each component with each carrying as much importance as the last or the next.
When learners can visualize the meaning of the material that they are learning about, the impact may be fully realized more. This can be done by introducing learners to scenarios and stories which have a powerful way of delivering a message.
In using scenarios and work stories that are relevant to the work experience in mimicking situations, employees are able to imagine themselves in such situations and they are able to direct their peers in acting more compliantly when confronted with real-life situations.
Engage learning strategies
To make Health and Safety training more engaging and memorable, it is imperative to apply a range of learning strategies which involve innovations such as gamifying learning which results in challenging learners.
It may also encourage employees to learn when they are faced with decisions that must be made in a safe but competitive environment which enables them to become active, instead of passive, receivers.
This allows learners to learn, explore, discover, and apply learning for themselves. Learning games also often reward learners for what they know, and it gives learners a sense of achievement.
Microlearning is another option to engage learning strategies as training is divided into manageable portions that can easily be accessed, digested, and retained more easily.
When using proportioned information with repetition, it can greatly aid in the retention of information. Using Microlearning along with quizzes or tests is a less tedious way to test the knowledge of learners and help to reinforce what has been learned.
What are the benefits of E-Learning?
It is not necessary for organizations to spend time on creating their own E-Learning modules when a ready-made solution is already provided by SafetyWallet in its provision of 36 Health and Safety E-Learning courses.
These E-Learning courses provide several advantages over traditional classroom training and it is a more effective way to ensure that training does not become a chore, but that it is effective, relevant, and employees enjoy learning more and subsequently applying it.
Visit SafetyWallet’s website www.safetywallet.co.za now.