The number one OH&S complaint about cleaning is that many staff are either not adequately trained and/or have poor language and literacy skills.
When you consider cleaning staff come from a labour pool that are predominantly new migrants to the country you can understand that the cultural mix in many organizations can be quite diverse.
This then presents an enormous challenge to managers of cleaning staff. How do they maintain adequate induction and training materials that can address the work place and language requirements of the employees they engage?
The Workplace Skills Unit at Swinburne University of Technology, who have a commitment to making a difference, identified this as an area that needed support and undertook to address these issues.
Funded under the Workplace Language and Literacy (WELL) program by the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and with cleaning industry input have created a workplace resource. The resource titled - Safe Cleaning Matters, provides excellent written and graphical instructions that can be used as an induction resource to complement a company’s current material.
The Safe Cleaning Matters resource addresses;
- Responsibilities,
- Employer's responsibilities
- Property manager and building owner responsibilities
- Cleaner's responsibilities
- Personal Safety
- Hazards and risks
- Site risk inspection
- Safe work practices
- Protecting your body
- Working alone
- Manual Handling
- Safe manual handling
- Doing stretching and warm up
- Exercises
- Follow safe manual handling rules
- Manual handling tasks
- Using Tools and Equipment
- Electrical safety
- Working at heights
- Hazardous Substances
- Material Safety Data Sheet ( MSDS)
- Using and storing chemicals
- Cross contamination
- Injury/Incident Management and Reporting
- Emergencies
- Keeping a First Aid Kit
- Reporting near misses and incidents
Each stage has a review section that allows the employee to review the material and make notes or qualify that they have understood the material before moving on to the next session.
The manual can be a standalone resource or incorporated into the individual employee's induction folder.
The resource is available exclusively through the Building Service Contractors Association (BSCAA)
The Resource Package.
The package contains;
- A great Induction tool - A DVD that steps through the six sections outlined above. This is great induction tool that supervisors can use in house or on site with a PC or laptop.
- Personalized induction and training manual - A glossy manual full of pictures from the DVD that new employees can step through section by section and answer the questions to validate their comprehension of the material. It can also be placed in the site operations folder in each cleaner’s cupboard and reference resource.
- Trainers Work Note – A PDF file on a CD that your trainer can print off to work through the manual with new employees.
- A PDF Copy of the Manual on CD – This allows you to incorporate this material into you company operational procedures if you wish.
- Are you meeting your OH&S/Workplace safety obligations?
- Are your cleaning cupboards compliant?
- Do you have a resource like this available to your staff?
This whole package is available now. To order click on this link. You can purchase the manuals in bulk and have one in each cleaner’s cupboard. They are available in bundles of 5
