The Complete Guide To Staff Fire Safety Training

When it comes to ensuring that your staff are well-versed in staying safe in the workplace, it’s about a lot more than simply knowing where to find the nearest fire exit.

Depending on the nature of your business, there are likely to be several different areas of health and safety that you’ll need to familiarise your team with via well-curated staff training.

So, what different training sessions should you be running within your workplace – and how should you go about it? Here’s our guide to staff safety training.

Identify The Training Needed

The first step in ensuring that all of your staff are fully trained to stay safe in the workplace is identifying what exactly that training must consist of. For example, if you’re the leader of a small office team in a ground floor office unit, you likely need little more than a simple but sufficient fire evacuation plan to keep your staff safe.

However, if you’re the general manager of a tourist attraction with hundreds of employees and thousands of guests, your fire safety training procedures will need to be a lot more detailed and thorough.

Once you have identified how extensive your training needs to be, you can get to work on deciding what exactly your training sessions will consist of.

Decide How To Carry Out Training

How will you deliver your training to your staff?

Fire safety training is incredibly important, so it requires far more than simply delivering a resource to your staff members and instructing them to go through it for themselves to familiarise themselves with the contents. The responsibility to keep your staff safe ultimately falls on you, the employer.

So, what’s the best and most effective way to deliver training? With a dedicated training session, complete with digital and physical resources and combining both instructional speaking and physical drills.

For the sake of ensuring that everyone receives the same quality of training and that any questions can be answered, we’d recommend delivering training sessions to no more than 30 staff members at a time. If your workplace is made up of far more employees, splitting these employees into groups would be advised.

Necessary Resources

In order to make sure that everyone’s different learning styles are catered for, a combination of both physical, visual and verbal training should be delivered.

Verbal training is the spoken instruction and teaching that you – or your business’ selected fire safety representative – will deliver to the team. This can be supported by visual training in the form of a digital presentation and accompanying paper handouts.

Physical training covers the fire drill – an incredibly important aspect of the training, as this will allow you to see your staff’s understanding of their fire safety training in practice.

Your visual handouts should be understandable on their own merit, so that staff are able to return to these for a reminder of their training if this is needed. Handouts should include both text and graphics, including an illustration featuring fire exits and exit routes, as well as a reminder of staff evacuation meeting points.

Assessments

You may choose to ensure that the training has been well received by staff by concluding your training with not just a fire drill, but a written assessment, too.

In this case, staff should be quizzed on factors such as where the fire extinguishers within your workplace can be found, what to do in the event of a fire, the identities of your workplace’s fire marshals, etc.

This is especially useful for checking that all staff are happy with the training, as test papers will give you a chance to check where your training can be improved next time.

Maintaining Standards

In order to maintain safety standards within your workplace, it’s important that you deliver this training no less than once a year, as well as ensuring that all new staff members receive the same training as their co-workers after joining the company.

Call On Safe & Sound

If you’d rather hand over the training of your staff to a professional, we’re happy to deliver such training sessions at Safe & Sound Ltd.

We believe that everyone has the right to feel safe within the workplace, with staff training being a huge aspect of ensuring this standard. When hired, we oversee that fire-prevention procedures are established in your workplace; fire suppression systems are inspected regularly and maintained; supervisors are trained to use fire extinguishers for incipient fires, and employees are trained to use evacuation routes and procedures. Supervisors are responsible for monitoring the use of flammable materials; training employees in safe storage, use and handling of flammables; and ensuring that storage area for flammables are adequately maintained.

If you’d like to call on Safe & Sound Ltd. For keeping your workplace as safe as possible, contact us today.