Health and Safety Induction: 3 Things It Has to Do
In most professional and technology firms, health and safety induction is a slide in a deck, somewhere between the expenses policy and the wifi password.
That is understandable. In an office the hazards are not obvious, the new starter is keen to get on with the job, and nobody wants to spend the first morning on fire extinguishers.
It also means the moment at which several distinct legal duties are supposed to be discharged passes without discharging any of them, and a proportion of the workforce never receives an induction at all.
Three things it has to do.
1. Give people the information the law says they are entitled to
Start with the duties, because there are more of them than people expect and they attach at different points.
Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires the provision of such information, instruction, training and supervision as is necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of employees.
Regulation 10 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires employers to provide employees with comprehensible and relevant information on the risks identified by the risk assessment, the preventive and protective measures, the procedures for serious and imminent danger, and the identity of the people nominated to implement evacuation.
Regulation 13 requires the employer to take account of employees' capabilities as regards health and safety when entrusting tasks, and to ensure they are provided with adequate training on recruitment and on being exposed to new or increased risks.
Article 21 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires employees to be provided with adequate safety training at the time they are first employed.
Regulation 6 of the Display Screen Equipment Regulations requires training in the use of any workstation on which a user may be required to work.
Read those together and induction is not a courtesy. It is where four or five separate obligations are met, and the fire one is explicit about timing: at the time they are first employed.
2. Be about this building and this job, not about safety
The content question, and it is where most inductions fail even when they happen.
A generic module explaining what a hazard is does not discharge regulation 10, because the duty is to inform people about the risks identified in your assessment and the measures you have taken.
What a new starter actually needs is short and specific:
Where to go when the alarm sounds, from where they will actually be sitting, and where the assembly point is.
Who the nominated people are, by name: fire wardens, first aiders, and who to tell about a problem.
What is unusual about this building, which in most offices is a short list: the comms room, the archive, a plant area, a step somewhere, the kitchen equipment.
How their workstation should be set up, and what they are entitled to ask for, including the eye and eyesight provision most people never hear about.
What to do if something is wrong, with a route that produces a response rather than an acknowledgement.
Anything specific to their role: lone working, client site attendance, driving, on-call, or a laboratory or hardware environment.
That takes fifteen minutes and a walk round. It is considerably more effective than an hour of e-learning, and unlike e-learning it produces the one thing that matters, which is that the person could act correctly tomorrow.
Where the organisation has a genuinely unusual environment, the walk round is not optional. HSE's material on worker involvement covers the wider principle that the people doing the work need to be part of the arrangements rather than recipients of them.
3. Reach the people who never get one
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The failure that matters most, because it is not about quality but about absence.
Five populations routinely receive no induction at all, and all five are common in professional and technology firms.
Contractors and agency staff, because they are not on the HR system, so nothing triggers the process. A freelancer four months into a desk who has never been shown the fire exit is among the most common findings in any audit.
People who joined remotely. Where onboarding happens over video and the person first attends the office weeks later, the building induction never happens, because the induction event has already been marked complete.
Senior hires. Executives and partners frequently skip the induction session, and they are as likely as anyone to need to know where the assembly point is.
People who moved. An internal transfer to a different floor, building or country is a new environment, and regulation 13 contemplates training on exposure to new or increased risks rather than only on recruitment.
Interns, placements and short-term staff, who are often the least experienced people in the building and the most likely to be treated as too temporary to bother with.
The fix is a trigger rather than a document: anybody who is going to work in your premises gets the same short induction, whoever employs them and however long they are staying.
The three, in short
| It has to | Common position | What is needed |
|---|---|---|
| Discharge the duties | A slide in the deck | Four or five obligations met, fire one at first employment |
| Be specific | Generic e-learning module | This building, this desk, these named people |
| Reach everybody | HR-system triggered | Anybody working in the premises, on arrival |
The third row is where the exposure sits, because the others are questions of quality and this one is a question of whether anything happened at all.
For international groups
Two considerations, and they cut in opposite directions.
Induction is one of the more prescribed duties abroad. Poland requires initial training and a medical certificate before an employee may be admitted to work. Romania requires an individual training record on a prescribed model, completed by hand. Lithuania requires introductory instruction recorded in a register immediately on conclusion of the employment contract, with primary and periodic instruction following. Croatia and Slovenia treat training for safe work as part of induction with their own record requirements.
A translated group module satisfies none of those, because the requirement is about the artefact and the register rather than the content.
The principle transfers well even where the machinery does not. The short, specific, building-based induction described above is good practice everywhere, and it is the part a group can genuinely standardise while each entity produces its own records.
Holding induction records across every entity in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits reliably find people who have been in a building for months without one.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite builds inductions that a new starter could act on the following day, which is a different exercise from producing a module. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with legal, finance and banking and IT and software organisations, where hiring is fast, contractors are common and onboarding is largely remote.
Where entities sit in several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction requires of induction and its records, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current. Our health and safety training covers the wider training duties that follow.
If somebody joined your organisation this year, works in your office, and could not say where the assembly point is, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
