A trainer you can trust – how continuity is key for health and safety company-specific training

About British Land

The British Land Company plc is one of the largest property development and investment companies in the UK. It is headquartered in London, is listed on the London Stock Exchange, and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index and a founding member of the European Public Real Estate Association.

International Workplace has worked with British Land and, prior to its acquisition by the company, Broadgate Estates, for 8 years, training staff in IOSH Managing Safely, Permits to work, and Risk Assessment and Method Statements (RAMS) training.

Jessica Rice is the Learning and Development Consultant at British Land, explains how having a trainer who really knows the business is invaluable for company-specific training.

Trainers who deliver personalised content 

We've been working with International Workplace for a good number of years. Kate Gardner has been doing our training since British Land acquired Broadgate Estates, which is great because she really knows the business, and she makes the training really specific. Kate keeps up to date with any changes that have happened in the business to make sure that the training is relevant and as specific as possible, which you're not going to necessarily get elsewhere.

Classroom-based training to online virtual training 

At the moment, everything is online, so most of our facilitated sessions are run over Teams and then the rest – such as IOSH – we've switched to elearning. Previously it was all classroom-based, which we held in our head office in London. However, it's actually been really good for us because we have operational sites all across the UK, all the way up in Edinburgh down to Plymouth. It was often really hard to capture people on some of the training as it meant they had to travel and stay overnight, so we've been able to capture so many more people over the last 18 months or so.

I think at first we wondered what it would be like online, but people are a bit more used to using Teams now. We've got really great feedback from those sessions being virtual, as opposed to face-to-face. So it's actually had a lot of benefits and I think, going forward, we'll probably look to do more of a blended approach – maybe some training could be classroom-based, but actually run more utilising the online format, to really be able to include all of our employees.

Where a lot of our health and safety staff are on site, it makes sense to do it online, whereas if people are already in one location we would definitely look at a face-to-face option as I think that's still really important.

Kate’s very well known to the business and she'll actually reach out before a session and speak to the health and safety team to see what their priorities are. The team are very flexible and quick to respond, so if we want to book in a last-minute training session they’ll see what availability Kate has and manage to fit us in, so it’s very efficient and easy. Having that one point of contact is really good. The fact that Kate knows the business really well, she just gets on with it, and we always get really great feedback from her training sessions as well.

British Land's health and safety training journey at International Workplace

Recent training that has taken place through International Workplace is as follows:

• 74 current employees trained in Permits to work.
• 70 current employees trained in RAMS.
• 41 employees trained in IOSH Managing Safely and IOSH Managing Safely Refresher since 2019.