How do you approach Health & Safety for your employees? How about for your temporary staff on site? Chances are, there’s a difference. 

Temporary staff are as in-demand as ever. AND, employing temporary team members allows flexibility for all involved, plus is a leaner way to operate for many businesses. 

But, concerns about the hazards and risks faced by the transient workforce have been growing due to the lack of sufficient H&S training for this group.

At LD Recruit, we believe all workers must be safe – whether they’re in a job for a week or for a decade. That’s why we take care of the general H&S training of the temps we deploy on your site before they start with you. 

This is how it happens.

Is Your Temporary Workforce Safe At Work?

The Importance Of Safety At Work
We don't need to tell you how important Health and Safety is in the workplace. After all, you probably have multiple manuals, procedures and team members dedicated to it.

We are willing to bet that each of your permanent team members go through a Health and Safety induction during your onboarding process. But, do your temporary team members do the same?

Temps are great at slotting into an existing team and completing the specific tasks that are set out for them. Because of that seamless integration, it’s easy to forget that they need induction too. Often, the intense health and safety modules that your employees undertake are not done by their temporary counterparts.

This common oversight can put your whole team at risk. So, it is vital that your temporary workforce have the same health and safety understanding as your permanent employees. Luckily at LD Recruit, we partner with you to make the process less time consuming.

How We Help You Protect Your Treasured Temps
We want to make sure all our recruits are healthy and safe at work every day. So, we partner with the experts WorkPro, using their smart safety and compliance e-learning programme modules to ensure the temps we recruit for you are trained in the most important aspects of health and safety before they start.

This WorkPro programme is specific to the New Zealand market. It:

• Contains learning modules authored by subject matter experts and practitioners which are designed to be job and industry based.
• Covers the most fundamental safety and compliance information to ensure temporary staff are aware of their work obligations, rights, and responsibilities.
• Contains content tailored to different types of employment and different H&S challenges, including:
  • Blue and white collar-specific H&S
  • Bullying and Harassment
  • Health sector-specific H&S
  • General safety and compliance 
• Includes competency-based assessment, providing strong audit and compliance evidence.
• Is available on any device for flexible, convenient delivery – making it easier and more appealing for temps to work through.

What’s more, once a module has been completed, it remains with the individual from job to job to reduce learning repetition and enable faster hiring – that’s better for them AND better for the employers hiring them!

What You Can Do To Ensure The H&S Of Temps Beyond Training

Obviously, you want to make sure everyone in your workplace is as safe as possible. However, a number of issues and barriers can affect temporary worker safety, beginning with unfamiliarity with a new workplace and its potential hazards. 

If not inducted correctly on safety procedures, your temps could be missing key parts of safety info. Yet even though they might recognise this, they might be reluctant to speak up about gaps in their knowledge for a variety of reasons. They may view a temp assignment as a pathway toward a permanent job and might have a desire to not “mess up” that opportunity – or miss out on income – by speaking up about safety issues or concerns. 

Fortunately, you can ensure there are no gaps in safety knowledge by partnering with a recruitment specialist like LD Recruit. We have a set of processes that we follow for H&S for temporary workers. These processes help to ensure your temps don’t shrink away from speaking up – and help them stick to H&S standards.

The Processes We Follow:

Communication between LD Recruit and you is key to ensure that the necessary protections are provided.

• We will inquire and review the conditions of our temporary workers assigned workspaces to ensure we are sending temporary employees to a safe environment.
• We will conduct annual reviews of all our client sites where temporary workers are deployed at to ensure ongoing commitment to health and safety standards remain. 
• We have all temporary workers complete online health and safety training before arriving to site so they are aware of their obligations
• On day one, we’ll check in to ensure that your temporary worker has been correctly inducted into your site and that they are comfortable with what’s required of them. We have checklists available to support you with this induction if you don't have your own.

By working collaboratively with you, we ensure that temp team members receive site-specific and task-specific training and hazard communication once they get on site.  We see health and safety as a three prong approach with a sharing of responsibility - Us, You and the Temp.

We work in partnership with you to ensure that the specific workplace hazards at your workplace are identified and that you have suitable risk management plans in place. If further support is needed, we can connect you with the right people to help. 

Remember the golden rule: Just because they’re a temporary worker doesn’t mean there’s any difference in their rights to safety and health in the workplace.

Ignorance of hazards – by you, by us, by the temp – is no excuse.

With this in mind, and with the support of LD Recruit, you’ll be sure to provide comprehensive H&S support to your temp workforce. Get in touch with us today to discover how LD Recruit can help you find the right temps who are ready to work safely for you.