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Nearly all jobs require training. As an employer, ensuring you provide your employees with adequate training will improve their productivity. Additionally, you owe certain legal obligations to your employees when it comes to training. This article will explain what employers need to know about staff training in the UK and how it intersects with your obligations.
What is Training?
Employee training is a necessary component of management and employment. Training can take various different forms, including:
- showing staff how to carry out a task;
- explaining what your staff should and should not do;
- ensuring your staff are aware of their rights and rules at work; or
- passing on information to your staff.
Health and Safety Training
As an employer, you have a legal duty to promote your employees’ health, safety, and well-being. In practice, this means that any training programme should be geared towards ensuring your employees can undertake their roles and responsibilities without undue risk;
This obligation to promote health and safety extends beyond employees and includes:
- management;
- contractors; and
- self-employed workers.
Depending on the nature of your business, there will be some areas of health and safety in which your staff will require training to carry out the work. For example:
- food hygiene;
- how to safely use dangerous materials;
- first aid;
- safe operation of machinery; and
- how to safely work from a height.
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Why Should an Employer Provide Staff Training?
In addition to promoting the health and safety of your staff, your business will obtain additional benefits. These include:
- improved management capabilities;
- identifying areas of improvement;
- create greater accountability;
- bolstered staff morale; and
- reduce customer complaints.
Additionally, providing staff training can help you to ensure you comply with additional obligations in the following areas:
Personal Data Compliance
As a business, you are legally responsible for ensuring that your business’s data is handed in accordance with the law governing the storage of personal data. The law will hold your business liable if employees handle personal data incorrectly. Therefore, any training programme should ensure employees know how to handle personal data accordingly.
Employer Disclosure Obligations
As an employer, you must ensure your employees understand the extent of their workplace rights. For instance, their holiday and sick pay entitlements. You can therefore ensure you comply with your disclosure obligations by incorporating this information into any employee training.
Key Takeaways
The law does not obligate you to provide staff training as such. However, as an employer, you owe various other obligations to your staff such as promoting their health and safety. Therefore, the practical effect is that you comply with your health and safety obligations by providing comprehensive staff training. Therefore, employers need to know about staff training as it relates to their wider obligations. There are additional benefits to training your employees, such as improved productivity. This is why providing employee training is good practice.
If you need help understanding staff training, our experienced employment lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents for a low monthly fee. So call us today on 0808 196 8584 or visit our membership page.
Frequently Asked Questions
You should provide training to all who work for you, whether, for example, employees, self-employed or contractors, where it is reasonably practicable to ensure their health and safety in the workplace.
As an employer, there are instances where you are legally required to allow your staff unpaid time off to train and study where they are legally classed as an employee and have been employed by you for at least 26 weeks. However, other criteria apply for time off to study or train to be a legal obligation.
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