Conducting safety inductions

The Christmas/New Year period is a time when many businesses employ new workers or employ people on short-term contracts to cover busy periods.

Duty of care provisions in the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1984 require employers to provide information, instruction and training to ensure workers are able to perform their work free from hazards.

The first step in introducing new workers into the workplace usually involves some form of induction training, which covers safety and health issues. In high-risk industries such as mining and construction, safety induction is required before a person commences work as part of industry or regulatory requirements.

For workplaces where induction is not mandatory, it is important to make safety and health induction training as useful and relevant as possible and to develop safe work attitudes. Handing someone a large file of policies and procedures and expecting a new employee to read and absorb them is not an effective way of ensuring that duty of care obligations are fulfilled, or the person is mindful of safety when they are working.

The best place to start is to determine what new workers actually need to know and how to convey the information in a way that they will understand and absorb. A variety of ways can be used to achieve this such as:

• face to face discussion with safety and health specialists such as safety and health officers or OHS reps;
• checklists;
• reading materials with some question and answer type testing of understanding;
• peer to peer induction; and
• classroom-based learning.

WorkSafe has resources available to assist in improving induction in your workplace. The first step, a WorkSafe publication available online (www.worksafe.wa.gov.au) or in hard copy, contains a checklist for induction of new workers that can be adapted to your workplace.

'New to the job' is a short safety and health video, produced by WorkSafe, aimed at new and young workers giving an overview of hazards, risks, accidents, emergencies, safety and health laws and basic OSH rights and responsibilities. Workplace examples are used to show how to apply the 'ThinkSafe SAM' steps to make workplaces safer: spot the hazard, assess the risk and make the change.

SmartMove is an online educational resource for secondary school students going on work experience and work placements (www.worksafe.wa.gov.au/pagebin/edcnwssm0018.htm). Information for both students and teachers is available; and can be adapted to form a good induction package for new workers.

WorkSafe WA
www.worksafe.wa.gov.au