How Safety Trainings in the Workplace Benefit Employees at Home, Blog Post
Our safety supervisor walked into his office recently one morning to find a note on his desk from an employee that read:
I wanted to say thank you from the bottom of my heart! By you giving me a refresher course of CPR, but specifically the Heimlich maneuver, I was able to save my daughter’s life last night, while choking on a piece of dog bone she found on the floor. YOU are AMAZING! Thanks again, Tristan
Teaching safety at WCCO Belting comes naturally to us. As a family-owned business, employees are like family. So when we conduct trainings, like CPR this past June during National Safety Month, not only did we teach employees about CPR for adults, but also for infants.
We take great pride in our safety program, which currently includes 18 courses overall, eight of which teach relevant safety skills that can be used outside of work. Our first responder training, for example, is one of our most comprehensive courses and is available to all interested employees. This course, which has 15 people registered for the next session, includes first aid, CPR and AED training, all conducted by certified staff members. Once attendees complete the three-week course, they become certified with the National Safety Council. In total, 27 employees have completed this training since its inception in 2019. Tristan, the employee who left the note for the safety supervisor, will be taking the course during this upcoming session.
We also provide fire extinguisher training, which is an OSHA required training, but can also be used at home. In August, we trained 87 employees how to use a fire extinguisher – our largest class ever! This training included both classroom time, where we reviewed the different types of extinguishers and types of fires, and hands-on training, where we created a controlled fire outside and attendees learned how to use the extinguisher to put it out.
Some of our other courses include heat exhaustion in the summer; and slips, trips, falls and severe weather driving in the winter. Our ladder safety and knife safety courses are also popular and have a lot of practical application externally.
Whether its teaching ladder safety or abdominal thrusts, the one common theme across all of our trainings is that we want our employees to have safety skills for real life. We’re a work family. Safety doesn’t start and end when you walk in our building. Our goal is to give our employees skills to keep themselves and their families safe both at work, and in their personal lives. Because when it comes to family, safety really does come first.