How to Conduct a Weekly Safety Meeting

WHY HAVE A WEEKLY SAFETY MEETING?

Weekly Safety Meetings are a fundamental part of safety awareness and can be one of the best motivators to drive safety in the workplace. Having a Weekly Safety Meeting will continue to encourage employee awareness and involvement by reviewing safety concerns, and promoting new safety initiatives and processes.

Purpose

• A process that empowers leaders to effectively deliver safety messaging to front line workers.
• A method to increase the relevance of safety messaging along with a corresponding call to action for attendees.
• Assurance to workers that frontline safety concerns are logged, addressed, communicated, and closed in a timely manner.
• Governance for tracking and gathering feedback to ensure the process is sustained and improved over time.

Holding a Safety Meeting

LEAVE YOUR TITLE AT THE DOOR 

The person facilitating the safety meeting ensures the meeting is held at the specified time, acts as the facilitator for the meeting, and ensures the meeting adheres to the procedures below.

This includes the following:

1. Arrive early to ensure meeting room and material is set up.
2. Before the meeting starts, assign attendees who will be accountable for the following tasks during the safety meeting.
3. A scribe to record meeting minutes, ensure the attendance sheet is completed and record items on the action log.
4. Set housekeeping and meeting expectations (for example, NO cell phone usage).
5. Set meeting norms and environment, such as:

• Keep subsequent discussions on topic and related to safety
• Articulate that Leadership should be encouraging engagement and collaboration from the audience.
• Suggest that people DO NOT read information-intensive slides or documents word for word but rather summarize the information and highlight key points and messages.
• Include a call to action to promote individual accountability for each issue raised.
• Review the status of outstanding actions identified in previous safety meetings.
• Ensure new issues and concerns are logged, including assigning owners and completion target dates if appropriate at this time.
• Review submitted quality assessment worksheets with the assessors at the end of the meeting.

Notes:

• REMEMBER TO LISTEN AND LEARN FROM YOUR AUDIENCE!
• WHAT THEY SAY WILL LET YOU KNOW HOW THEIR DAY WILL TURN OUT!
• KEEP YOUR MEETING POSITIVE, IF SOMEONE WANTS TO TURN IT NEGATIVE ELIMINATE THE OPPORTUNITY.
• REMEMBER TO TELL EVERYONE TO TURN THEIR PHONES OFF!
• REMEMBER QUALITY NOT QUANTITY

How to prepare a Weekly Safety Meeting:

• Prepare the Weekly Safety Meeting presentation around the current Safety Program activity.
• Confirm a room/area for the Weekly Safety Meeting to be held.
• Complete date/time/location on a Meeting Location Poster or similar media.
• Install the completed Meeting Location Poster in areas highly visible to the workforce such as lunchrooms, bulletin boards and common areas to ensure maximum attendance.
• Prepare injury stats from the week prior.
• Prepare the Weekly Safety Meeting Minutes.
• Prepare Weekly Safety Meeting Attendance Sheet.
• Schedule a Safety Leader or similar to present the Weekly Safety Meeting and prepare a Safety Moment.
• Identify a person with a previous activity Safety Program related injury or opportunity that may be willing to share their story at the Weekly Safety Meeting.
• Review the previous Weekly Safety Meeting concerns/actions and be informed of the status.

Conducting the Weekly Safety Meeting:

• All attendees are to sign the attendance sheet and have a Safety Moment. (5 Minutes)
• Review concerns/actions from previous Weekly Safety Meeting record all incomplete actions and concerns. (10 Minutes)
• Discuss injury stats for the week prior. (10 Minutes)
• Conduct Weekly Safety Meeting around the current Safety Program Activity. (15 Minutes)
• Invite person with previous program related incident to share their story at the meeting. (5 Minutes)
• Encourage participation from all attendees and provide them opportunities to raise safety concerns and workplace conversation successes. (10 Minutes)
• Discuss the quality of FLHA / Tailboards, Safety Talks and Safety Moment Documents. (PICK 1 PER MEETING MAKE IT QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY) (5 Minutes)
• Record safety concerns/action that need to be addressed, assign owners and give target dates for completion. (15 Minutes)
• Discuss any other initiatives, processes and opportunities. (15 Minutes)

STAY ON TOPIC – DO NOT LET ANYONE TAKE OVER YOUR MEETING.

Running a Safety Talk

What is a Safety Talk?

Safety Talks are generally a short meeting (10 to 15 minutes in length) that take place at the beginning of shift. They provide an opportunity for the Supervisors and workers to collaborate on how to safely perform the work planned for the upcoming shift.

• KEEP YOUR SAFETY BOX TALK POSITIVE AND INFORMATIVE!
• REMEMBER TO REINFORCE DAY TO DAY LINE OF FIRE ISSUES!
• NO CELL PHONE USE DURING SAFETY TALK!

Make Sure Your Safety Talks:

• Are safety-related discussions and/or information sharing.
• Are timely and relevant to the work to be completed on that shift or provide learning from similar work that was completed recently.
• Are where the workers can bring forward new safety concerns and have them added to an action log.
• Contain feedback for the worker on resolved safety concerns and outstanding action items with an update on expected completion time.
• Are prepared in advance.  Bringing additional related materials like photos or tools are recommended.

Conducting the Safety Talk:

• Conduct a Safety Moment and encourage others to bring a safety moment to share.
• Conduct the Safety Talk.
• Review a positive FLHA / Tailboard.
• Review action items from the previous Safety Talk.
• If previous action items have not been resolved issue a new due date.
• Fill out Minutes, log any new action items and assign a due date and a person accountable.

After the Safety Talk:

• Prepare to discuss your meeting with your supervisor with all minutes and actionable items.

Getting the Most out of your Safety Meeting or Safety Talk

Whether it is your first or hundredth Safety Talk or Safety Meeting that you conduct, remember to keep our audience awake and engaged. The success to these meetings is the amount of participation we get from our audience…the more the better!.

Ensure that in all meetings to please leave your title at the door. You might be a Manager, Supervisor, Safety Adviser or a worker who is conducting the meeting, but that doesn’t matter as everyone is equal as our goal is ultimately the same: “Going home the same way we came to work”.

Start all meetings with a Safety Moment! This great for engagement and will encourage them to share in a Safety Moment. This may take a few times, but if you are consistent you will see everyone will want to share. It is human nature not to speak out initially…. take the lead and show them that you care and they will kick in. It can be a personal or work related experience and should be as simple and take no longer than a minute or two.

Many people conduct Safety Talks and Safety Meetings on a daily basis and 9 out of 10 of these people conducting the meetings do not get the most out of their meetings because:

• They might be new to conducting meetings.
• They might have many years of experience conducting meetings but they have never been taught how to do it properly.
• They may be the wrong person conducting the meetings as they don’t really want to do them and have been just thrown into it or they just don’t care.

Here are some tips to get the most out of a Safety Talk and Safety Meeting:

1. PLEASE CARE!
2. Prepare for the meeting by reviewing the Safety Talk or Safety Meeting prior to the meeting.
3. Arrive early to ensure the room and material is ready.
4. Turn all cell phones on silent and put them away.
5. Keep the meetings positive and informative.
6. Ask questions when conducting your meetings.  Engage your audience.
7. Change the tone of your voice when conducting meetings.
8. Ask your audience if they have any concerns or comments they want to bring forward.
9. Have someone else speak at the meetings.  It is good to prepare them prior to the meeting starting.
10. Listen to what everyone has to say and don’t interrupt them.

By following these SIMPLE ten points on “How to get the most out of a Safety Talk and Safety Meeting” this will help you be successful and when everyone sees you are consistent and that you care, EVERYONE will follow your lead and will enjoy this time with you.

Safety Moments

What is a Safety Moment?

A Safety Moment is a brief (2-5min) safety talk about a specific topic. These Safety Moments are consistent reminder of the daily hazards we face in our day to day lives. 

Your Safety Moments:

• Will be conducted at the beginning of every meeting and can be held with a single worker at any point during the shift.
• Will be most impactful if they come from personal experience. Show the audience that this story has had an impact on you.
• Will consist of the cause, effect, solution and the lessons learned.
• Ask the audience questions. (Eg. Has anyone done this before? How did they come to a solution? What did you learn from it?)

After the Safety Moment:

• If concerns are raised during the safety moment, have them added to the meeting minutes.
• Document any ideas for brought forward for future Safety Moments.