A: Compliance training is a crucial type of training needed to inform employees of an organisation’s regulations, policies, or adherence to laws. The term compliance refers to the notion of accepting and agreeing and is used to describe the training because of its mandatory nature. Compliance training is often mandatory for employees because it serves to protect an organisation’s values, policies, and commitment to the law.

Some examples of compliance training include data and cyber security, data protection and GDPR, basic health and safety training, environmental management, and anti-bullying.

What type of training you or your organisation needs largely depends on what type of work you are doing. For example, in banking or insurance employees will likely be required to undertake fraud awareness or anti-bribery training. This type of training is probably not appropriate for warehouse and factory staff, instead they may require manual handling training.

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Act 1999 places a duty on employers to consider the capabilities of their employees and to ensure that they are provided with the health and safety training needed to ensure that they carry out their work competently. This legislation sits underneath the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, along with other associated regulations on chemicals, manual handling, display screen equipment, construction & many other specific areas. As a Make UK EHS member, you can get access to a health and safety legislation tracker.

Ultimately, compliance training isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach. For more information on what environment, health and safety training your organisation requires please contact us.

A: Failure to carry out the adequate training could result in an employer breaching their legal duties. This could result in fines and/or prosecution. Additionally, having incorrect or inadequate training effects workers morale and productivity so an organisation may find it harder to attract and retain talent.

More specifically, health and safety training ensures that people remain safe as well as promoting a positive culture in the workplace.

A: It is recommended that regular refresher training is carried out to remind employees of the regulations, policies, or legal impact.

With regards to health and safety training, The Management of Health and Safety at Work Act states that training must be repeated periodically and where appropriate. Even though the regulations do not mention specific details regarding the frequency of refresher training this would be taken into consideration by enforcement agencies if an incident happened.

A: A training record can help you prove legal compliance so we would certainly recommend that you record what training your employees have undertaken.

A training record can also be useful to keep track of people’s skill sets and highlight when refresher training is required. A sample training record can be found within the Resources section on this page.