As we head into the hectic holiday season, it’s important to ensure that you’re continuing to induct your workers both safely and efficiently.

Avoid the temptation to rush through your normal processes, particularly if you are increasing your headcount for the festive period. Instead, use this time to perfect your onboarding and safety training.

View it as an opportunity to test your induction processes on a larger number of employees than usual, so you can clearly identify what’s working … and what isn’t.

When it comes to assessing the safety induction component of your process, there are a few key things to watch out for. It’s vital to have a set of guidelines or a checklist when it comes to assessing your safety induction in order to ensure it aligns with industry standards.

Remember, Australian employers have a duty of care to protect workers from workplace incidents and injury, and a legal obligation to meet national compliance standards for safety in their specific industry. The SafetyCulture website has collated their 10 steps to producing an effective induction:

1. Create an induction based on how people learn
2. Cover all safety hazards
3. Cover all key safety personal
4. Avoid lecturing
5. Get active during the induction
6. Use examples during the induction
7. Engage the inductees using questions
8. Have a set agenda
9. Build a template
10. Make sure everyone understands

There are also some mistakes that employers commonly make when developing and assessing their safety induction.

One of the biggest errors is not periodically renewing learning.

With so much to take in at induction, employees are likely to experience information overload during the initial process, or simply forget it over time.

This is why it’s important to make sure that you regularly refresh important training, so that your workplace is an environment where people can work and feel safe, at all times.

It’s also important to present information in an interactive and engaging way, rather than forcing all employees to learn via one method, for example reading large slabs of text. In fact, there are four primary types of learners: visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic (this simply means learning through feeling and doing – particularly important in blue collar and manual handling industries).