Putting Your Employees at Risk Puts Your Company at Risk

Work-related incidents are a risk to your business

In 2016 in Australia there were 182 fatal work-related accidents including:

• 25 from falls
• 17 from being hit by moving objects
• 8 from being trapped by moving machinery
• 7 from electrical contact
• 4 from being trapped between stationary and moving objects

From 2015 to 2016 a total of 104,770 compensation claims were made for serious injuries, where serious injury is defined as an incapacity that results in a total absence from work for one working week or more.

These incidents cost employers millions of dollars in compensation for work-related accidents.

While these accidents are most prevalent in jobs involving transport, warehousing and construction, even the most common jobs can have unseen risks.

In April 2017, the Supreme Court ordered Coles Supermarkets to pay an employee $1 million after she slipped off a stepping stool and injured herself. She had only been employed at the supermarket for a month and had not received any training on how to properly use the stepping stool when straightening shelves.

Lawyers representing Coles management said there was no special training needed to use a stepping stool, but the Supreme Court disagreed.

Every business would like to think that their company can adequately teach new employees (as well as remind the senior ones) about everything they need to know to do their job. However, these issues often remain:

• Staff don’t have all the training they need for certain duties
• Staff can access areas they are not authorised to be in, areas they aren’t trained to be in, or areas that are not safe for them
• Organisations cannot precisely determine what skills an employee does or doesn’t have

A good solution to this problem is making sure your employees and contractors are trained or inducted suitably about everything they need to know before taking on any tasks. Standard manuals can only impart so much information, can be easily misplaced and eventually inevitably become obsolete. Knowledge passed on from senior employees to junior employees can also be useful, but is not necessarily official information.

Rapid Induct by Rapid Global is a online induction software solution that allows organisations to efficiently induct their employees and contractors with information on their job role, company policies, safety procedures and other relevant information.

Our workplace induction program can be customised to suit individual needs and be accessed by the inductee from any computer or device with internet connectivity.

Through the online induction system, employers will have full access to the induction material and the interface, making it easy for them to design training courses, modules, questionnaires, and other key tools. Material can also be easily modified in the case that a policy has changed, or temporary conditions need to be addressed.

Don’t risk the consequences of unqualified personnel getting hurt on the job because of your company’s outdated induction practices. Switch to Rapid Induct by Rapid Global and get access to the tools that will make sure all the right people have the right training.

Rapid Induct is designed to be used hand in hand with our incident reporting and risk reporting softwares as well. With the right combination of safeguards in place, you can protect your employees from harm and your company from potential lawsuits.