Written by Daniel Aday, CompOne Administrators Safety & Loss Prevention Specialist
With everything that goes on day-to-day and constantly playing catch up with customers, jobs, and everything else, safety training is one of many items that may be forgotten. Safety training is not only required by law, but also significantly helps reduce worker-related injuries and keeps jobs on pace. Although it does take time away from a job – to gather individuals and prepare a course to teach – the time invested in training comes back as time well spent as compared to spending countless hours and dollars on accidents, fines and citations after they occur.
While MIOSHA’s standards are set as the bare minimum for a company or organization to follow, they provide guidelines and have shown to improve safety within a company. The following is a list of training that is required from MIOSHA, and while it is not a complete list of all safety trainings that you should be conducting, it serves as a reminder to ensure that you are within compliance and protecting your workers.
New Employee Training
When hiring new employees, it is imperative that training be performed prior to any exposure of such recognized hazards. Countless times, you will see employers waiting for weeks, even months, to conduct training for new hires so that training can be done all at once. While this may seem more economical, there is a significant portion of all accidents that occur within the first period of employment that can easily be avoided by implementing training before work is done.
Basic training should be established on the first day, or the first week of employment if the first day does not allow enough time. It should include a fundamental understanding of your company’s safety procedures, your accident prevention program, demonstration or instruction of your company’s safety data sheet management system, emergency response (including fire response, protection and evacuation procedures), usage of all applicable PPE that may be used, limitations of PPE and how to use it correctly and any other job specific tasks that the employee may perform. More extensive training may be warranted for ear protection, respirators, and other PPE that requires fit testing or health screenings.
Training is also required on particular hazards of whatever jobs or duties your company performs (such as fall hazard awareness, which may include the usage of fall protection, fall prevention, safe usage of guardrails), all MIOSHA and OSHA applicable regulation, confined space entry, machine guarding and similar hazards that encompass every day duties.
Recognized Hazards
Additional training is required for recognized hazards in specific tasks, including: cranes and derricks; usage of ladders; scaffolding; usage of excavators; hoist operations; forklift training, aerial work platform, and other motorized equipment used for lifting, moving, or deconstruction; masonry wall bracing; welding; in-depth training for powder actuating tools and positioning devices.
First Aid
MIOSHA requires that at every job-site there is an individual who is trained on First Aid and can respond with treatment, if such instance ever arises. Most certifications for first aid last for three years.
As Needed
Several of these items, in which MIOSHA and OSHA ask that you perform training for your employees, do not give parameters as to how often training should be conducted. These could fall under as needed, upon hire, or annually. It is best to ensure that these are performed as soon as possible, and often enough to ensure that no unsafe work condition is created due to the lack of training. When in doubt, you should always side on training more frequently than not enough. Over the span of a year, important information may be forgotten, which is why you will typically see annual training conducted on most of these topics.
There are few topics that require training every three years, including forklift and other powered industrial equipment. However all training is warranted when there are deviations from your company’s safety policy and what is being observed.
Additionally, retraining should occur if an incident occurs and if an audit finds error or a previously unknown hazard. Lastly, ensure that if you promote within the company and job duties are modified, existing workers should go through complete training and become qualified in all new roles.
If you need any assistance with investigating an incident or are interested in accident investigation training, please feel free to contact me at daday@compone.net or at 734-341-6620.