Safety meetings provide an ideal opportunity to promote workplace safety and talk about specific safety problems affecting your workers. Here are five steps to help your meetings be all they can be .
Premeeting Preparation
Schedule safety meetings early in a shift when your employees are more alert and less likely to be in the middle of a crucial task. Avoid Mondays and Fridays if employees have the weekend off. Also, set a regular schedule, such as the first Tuesday of the month or every other Wednesday.
Inform everybody who needs to know. Send out reminders the day before, and confirm orally with all the employees you have contact with during the previous day.
Planning is essential for effective meetings. Our sister website Safety.BLR.com says that to get the most out of each safety meeting, think about five key issues—content, method, location, reinforcement, and follow-up. For simplicity’s sake, think of each issue as a step in the process of producing successful safety meetings.
Step 1: Choose timely and pertinent content. What you talk about at each meeting depends on the current safety issues and challenges facing your department. Maybe there was an accident or near miss. In that case, focus your meeting on the cause of the incident and the necessary corrective measures. Maybe you’ve noticed that some employees aren’t wearing required personal protective equipment (PPE) or perhaps you’ve seen some people taking shortcuts or fooling around.
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Recent changes in OSHA regulations or your employer’s safety policies are also good topics for a meeting. Any of these situations could form the basis for a timely and effective safety meeting. The fact is that you’re not likely to find any shortage of topics.
Your main problem may be prioritizing and deciding which issue is most important right now. Of course, you could also decide to deal with a couple of issues at one meeting. That’s OK if you have only a few words to say about one topic and spend the rest of the meeting focusing on the other. Otherwise, it’s probably best to follow the "one topic per meeting" rule of thumb. It’s easier for employees to remember the information that way, and it also makes for a shorter, more focused meeting—and short, to-the-point meetings are always good.
Step 2: Choose the best method. Depending on the topic of the meeting, you might opt to do a demonstration, have a discussion, or give a talk followed by a question-and-answer session. The most effective meetings involve interaction between you and employees, and among employees. The best meetings also involve hands-on practice, whenever that’s appropriate. It’s also a good idea to use visuals as well as words-charts, pictures, diagrams, a list of key points, or maybe even a short video.
Remember what training experts say: People retain more of what they see than what they hear or read, and they remember most the things they actually do.
In other words, don’t just tell employees how to follow a new procedure or how to operate a piece of equipment. Show them. And then let them practice.
If there’s nothing to demonstrate or to get employees to practice on, stop your safety talk every few minutes to ask a question or start a discussion. The more you involve employees in the meeting, the more they’ll learn—and that means they’ll be better equipped to work safely on the job.
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Step 3: Pick the right location. Link your meeting location to your training method. For example, if you’re demonstrating how to safely operate a new piece of equipment, the meeting has to be held where the equipment is. If you’re demonstrating safe lifting techniques, you need to be somewhere where there are items to lift and space for employees to spread out and practice. If you’re discussing an accident, the logical place to hold the meeting is at the scene of the accident. If you opt for a lecture format and a classroom setting, make sure the space you choose is quiet, convenient, big enough to hold everybody comfortably, and equipped with any items you need for your presentation.
Tomorrow we’ll look at steps 4 and 5 for optimizing your safety meetings, and we’ll look at a money-saving resource that simplifies all of your safety training and compliance needs.