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Safety Orientation: Why you need a Safety Orientation

A safety orientation is a core part of ensuring new employee and contractor safety in the workplace. Ensuring that all new staff and contractors have done a safety orientation is critical for ensuring they work safe and stay safe on site as well as going through important HR policies and procedures. A safety orientation common consists of several steps for contractors, employees and workers to progress through ranging from data collection steps for forms, presentation and slideshow steps for safety orientation content, check lists and document libraries for acknowledgements and assessments to make sure that staff have understood the orientation content before them.

When you need a Safety Orientation

All new employees, staff, volunteers, visitors and contractors need to go through a safety orientation before they start work in the workplace. This ensures that they are properly prepared for working safely in the workplace and that they're co-workers will also work safely. It prepares them for how to report an incident when something goes wrong, what hazards are present in the workplace and what safety procedures to follow.

Structuring your Safety Orientation

What are some of the most important and popular parts of a safety orientation?

Safety on site, what you need to know about working safely in the workplace
Policies and procedures acknowledgement
Contractor and Employee focused orientation
Testing competency
Capture licenses / evidence of training

Things to avoid

When your creating a safety orientation, here's the lessons learned on what not to do

A giant handbook that no one reads
Skipping important safety topics such as emergency procedures
Failing to test their knowledge to ensure they understand the safety orientation
Didn't capture emergency contact details
Didn't capture evidence of training and competency

Workplace Safety Orientation for Contractors and Employees

The thing to remember is that a safety orientation is for both contractors and employees. Contractors might be your suppliers, adhoc contractors or sub contractors. Employees might be full time, part time or casual employees.

You should establish specific safety orientations for each role type. They'll have different content specific to the nature of being an employee or a contractor. You may also setup site specific safety orientations. These will cover the safety obligations of a specific workplace or work location or facility. What does a worker need to know about a specific building they are working in? Is there a site tour to go through, do they need to go through an orientation of manual handling, working in a confined space? are their hazards to be aware of? Consider all these areas in your safety orientation.

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