Why Do Director & Senior Execs Need Health & Safety Training?

We are often asked why Directors and Senior Managers need health and safety training. Often they say “I don’t work machines. I don’t drive forklift trucks; so why do I need this training?” But that misses the point.

The point is that they need Health and Safety training on what they’re managing or directing. Many organisations will say that their Board can’t possibly spend the day on Health and Safety training. But why not? Health and Safety is something that can actually put a business at risk and put Directors personally at risk. It has the ability to destroy their organisation, so managing it is quite important.

What is often not realised is that anyone over the age of 16 can be a Director of a UK company and yet there is no inherent requirement for training or necessary experience in running a business.

Directors of large organisations are usually appointed for their knowledge and experience. However, that experience is usually in the business or industry in which they’re working, or the financial area that they’re controlling. They don’t necessarily understand the liabilities they have, the decisions they need to take and how to take those decisions around Health and Safety matters. This means that they could be over cautious, thinking that they need to be overly risk-averse. Or they don’t understand the implications of taking decisions, which might appear quite sound from a business point of view and which could prevent disasters from happening. 

To save costs, Directors could decide to trim training budgets or scale back maintenance programs. Unfortunately either of these could lead to a nasty incident which is linked back to the Director’s decisions. This is why Director training in Health and Safety is about getting it right – helping Director to make the safest decisions for the future of the organisation and its people. Training is also about protecting Directors from liability and showing them where those liabilities are.

At Quadriga we regularly run the IOSH Safety for Executives and Directorstraining at our offices in Reading. To see the next available dates, click here. To speak to us about arranging suitable training for your organisation, please call us on 0118 929 9920 or click here to email us