Safety Briefings are a way of recording that your employees have read and understood key Health & Safety documents.
These key Health & Safety documents include:
• Risk Assessments
• Checklists
• Safe Systems of Work such as Safe Working Procedures, Method Statements, and Permits to Work.
(If you want to record that your employees have read and understood your Safety Policies and Staff Handbooks, you can do that from within those specific modules.)
The difference between Safety Briefings and other forms of HSM training courses is that you can attach an ‘Associated Record’ to the briefing. This links the risk assessment, checklist, or safe working procedure to the briefing.
You can still see Safety Briefings in your Training Matrix and in your reporting.
You also have the option to record attendance to a Safety Briefing using a signature. When setting up the Safety Briefing, just remember to tick the box that asks ‘Can a signature be provided when recording attendance?’.
Once you’ve set up your Safety Briefing, you can assign the employees who need to be informed. This will send them a copy of the Safety Briefing within the Health and Safety Management System.
Once you’ve selected and assigned the employees who require this Safety Briefing, you can record their attendance and ask them to provide a signature, asking them to confirm that they have read and understood the Safety Briefing.
Again, their attendance will be saved to the overall training records.
If you would rather that your employees signed off on paper, just follow the above steps, but leave the signature fields blank. Then, print off the Associated Record document itself (for example, a Risk Assessment) and tick ‘Include Safety Briefing signatories’.
You will get a PDF document with fields allocated for the assigned employees to sign off on.
You can do this process for risk assessments, checklists, and Safe Systems of Work documents, so long as you’ve already made them into a Safety Briefing and assigned employees to them.