Workplace Mental Health
The mental health of employees and managers is a topic that has significantly increased in priority of the last few years. In the past, the mental health and wellbeing of the workforce was given very little consideration by company owners. Employees were seen as more of a commodity than people to be taken care of. Also, with the majority of mental health issues being practically invisible and extremely hard to spot by someone who does not know the signs to look out for, it was difficult for line managers (or colleagues) to identify that something was wrong before the current levels of increased awareness came about.
E-Books in the "Healthy at Work" Package
As can be seen from the titles included in the "Healthy at Work" e-book package, these Useful Guides concentrate primarily on subjects that can have a significant bearing and influence upon an individual's state of mind. Titles and topics such as Being Resilient, De-Stress You and Work Life Balance deal with the mental aspect of working life, and how care needs to be taken to ensure that stresses, demands and pressures created in the working environment do not build up and cause mental health problems for a person.
Many of the e-books contained in this Useful Guide package do not just provide guidance on what to do when things have reached a low point, but also deal with taking proactive action. The aim is to not only try and prevent a negative mental health issue such as depression or anxiety occurring, but to develop a positive mindset that brings about many benefits for both the individual themselves and their employer. Titles such as Create a New You and Being Influential serve to assist a person take control and encourage positive actions in their lives. By doing so, it can have tremendous benefits not only on their mental health, but also their career and their professional and personal relationships with others.
What are the Benefits of e-Books for Health and Safety?
One of the great things about e-books is that they can be read over and over again, to ensure that all the information they have to offer is learnt and retained, ready for future use.
Unlike a training course where a delegate really only gets one chance to hear what the course tutor says and take it in, an e-book can be re-read, and can also be saved and used when required at a later date to refresh a person's memory.
The Need for Health and Safety Training Courses
As good as e-books are, there is really only so much information that can be gained from them. Especially true for a topic like workplace health and safety, which is so broad and encompasses the need to know a lot of quite technical and in-depth knowledge, there really is no substitute for high quality health and safety training courses. Although training options such as online learning and distance learning have their place - and can be an ideal choice for some situations - a classroom course led in person by a tutor is nearly always the optimum method for teaching and actually learning information.
The sheer amount of information being taught is one of the main reasons as to why classroom courses are much more preferable to e-books. Reading a large book can be a challenge at the best of times and can cause tiredness (which is why a lot of people read last thing at night before going to sleep). If this can happen with an exciting book, then one which contains detailed health and safety text and references to complicated legislation is far more likely to lead to a person skim reading or not taking it all in. Maintaining attention spans by keeping a person interested and alert as they learn is critical for effective training, which is why it plays such a key part on the syllabus for our Train The Trainer courses.
The other advantage of attending a classroom course with a tutor present in the room is that the ability to ask questions in "real time" can prove invaluable for understanding everything taught. So many times on distance or online learning courses, candidates either struggle through it on their own, or, if they do have the option to contact a tutor and write them a message, it can take time for the reply to come back. Plus, the reply will be a single message i.e. not a flowing, back and forth dialogue that would take place were the two people in the same room together.
This difficulty in asking questions and clarifying points can severely hamper an individual's ability to learn all they need to from the course. E-books can create a similar issue, in that if there is a part that the reader does not understand, or if their focus wanders and they continue to read but not actually take in the information, they will not learn all they need to know for them to be able to work safely when back in their role. This is a big problem, considering that learning the information was ultimately the whole point in them undertaking the training in the first place!
Using e-Books and Courses to Teach Health and Safety
Along with being excellent stand-alone resources, many of our clients choose to use the e-books in addition to health and safety training courses, rather than simply opting for one or the other. The information contained in the Useful Guide e-books complements the knowledge acquired on a training course. This means that they can be used now or further down the line as useful refreshers to reinforce learning, and be handy reference guides when required in the future.