The Role of a Workplace Safety Trainer

You value your employees. Without them, you’d never be able to get the job done. That’s why you want to make sure that your employees stay safe and healthy in the workplace, especially if they work with hazardous materials or heavy machinery.

Safety trainers ensure that your workplace is up to industry safety standards. Here are four key duties a safety trainer does for you.

Provide a Workplace Free of Hazards

The foremost duty of a workplace safety trainer is to provide a workplace that’s safe and free of hazards for your employees.

In practice, that duty is a bit more complicated than it sounds. For example, a safety trainer is responsible for staying up-to-date on the health and safety standards of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to ensure that your company is complying with those standards.

But their role can also run to the more mundane, such as checking for appropriate signage and floor markings to ensure that employees are sufficiently warned about potential hazards.

Ensure Employee Compliance

A big part of creating a safe workplace is ensuring employee compliance with safety rules, and that’s exactly what a safety trainer does.

After all, the best safety program in the world won’t help you if your employees don’t follow it. That’s why a safety trainer is responsible for ensuring that your company implements a comprehensive safety culture. You need to be able to identify hazards, but you should also have a culture of respect and open communication so that employees feel they can communicate a problem when they see one.

Improving Workplace Safety

This is why a safety trainer’s overall role is heavily tied to improving workplace safety. Any aspect of workplace safety can fall under their domain, depending on how your company structures the role.

For example, a safety trainer may be responsible for the implementation of various health and safety programs in the workplace, including:

• Hazard assessment
• Hazard communication
• Chemical hygiene plans
• Lab safety plans
• Exposure control, including various pathogens
• Respiratory protection
• Emergency response
• Confined space entry
• Lockout/Tagout 

Other safety trainers may be focused more on onboarding new employees to ensure compliance. Some might focus primarily on updating current employees about new safety programs. Others might be focused on the education aspect.

Educating Employees

Regardless of the company-specific variations, most safety trainers have one thing in common: they’re responsible for educating employees about their roles and responsibilities in keeping the workplace safe.

This begins from the first day an employee joins the team and continues until their last day in the office. Safety trainers know OSHA regulations and are the first to know of changes to company safety rules, which means it’s their job to teach employees about what’s expected of them.

For many safety trainers, this means periodic safety training and education sessions to ensure that employees are up-to-date.

Do You Need a Better Safety Trainer?

Your safety trainer works hard to keep your workplace hazard-free, but they can’t do their job if you don’t support them. It’s not enough to just have a trainer. You need a workplace safety culture to ensure their standards are being met.

Featured Resource: Safety Training Management Guide