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 We all have safety meetings and discussions. These
discussions are a chance to focus our thoughts and actions on those important
things we need to do to work safely. The trouble is that if we have a lot of
safety meetings then they tend to get pretty repetitious and stale. Chances are
that the last safety meeting you attended went on much too long, didn’t include
enough discussion and even worse, felt like a waste of time to many who were
there.
Let’s think about making your next safety discussion:
effective, efficient, meaningful and, dare I suggest, engaging and encouraging?
Wow! That’s no small order. Here are some quick ideas for making your next
safety discussion a lot more interesting and a ton more effective. These
approaches really work!
Energy / barrier discussion
We can start by getting the people at the meeting to list
the energy sources that they’ll be facing during the next few hours of work. Is
there a chance someone could come in contact with electricity? Perhaps gravity
could work against us and we could fall. Is there a chance that objects may be
flying at us, caused by us using a power saw or grinder?
Next, we need to list all the things that can be done to
protect us from those harmful energies. Perhaps we can wear a personal
protective device to ensure we don’t fall or get hit by a flying object. Maybe
the use of lockout procedures will ensure that the electrical energy is
isolated. These would be barriers to the energies hitting us and causing our
injury.
Incident imaging
There is a long history in the occupational health and
safety business of asking employees to report “near misses” or “near hits.”
Basically we want to hear about incidents that could have
resulted in more severe consequences, but because of luck we didn’t pay a
higher price. Unfortunately in a lot of companies we are unlikely to hear about
employee mistakes, because frankly, we’re embarrassed. Not many folks I know
want to document their latest mistake in triplicate to be reviewed at the next
round of safety meetings. It’s just not in most people’s nature to expose
themselves to this potentially embarrassing focus.
What we can do as a technique is to ask folks what “could”
happen here. This will allow your people to tell you those stories that “did”
happen but under the guise of maybe “could” happen. It’s a much safer way to
expose what employees know and not run the risk of public embarrassment. It
goes like this:
In your next meeting get the group to do a bit of “let’s
pretend” or incident imaging. It’s a simple and effective process to get groups
of people to think about what could happen next.
Which incidents that we don’t want to happen could happen?
For example, if your crew is doing earthworks then you simply get the group to
list all the incidents that could happen during that process.
No doubt you’ll come up with cave in, utility hits, workers
falling, tripping, people hit by swinging backhoe buckets, etc. The next step
is to list the things we’ll need to do to make sure these imagined incidents
don’t actually happen. Barricade the swing area around the bucket, ensure we
cutback the trench, keep the larger pieces of clay and rock out of the trench
access areas. It’s an effective way to engage discussion.
Safe activators
Another idea is to discuss what we can use and do to remind
each other to be safe. In a great number of incidents an important cause of
people getting hurt is that they just didn’t think about what would happen
next. Behavioural experts call these activators to behaviour. A sign reminding
you to wear your safety glasses is an activator. A reminder from a co-worker is
also an activator. “Hey Alan, don’t forget your safety glasses!” is an example
of a great activator. If I was going to go do something where an eye injury
hazard existed then my fellow worker warning me has increased the likelihood
that I’d actually wear my safety glasses! We do this for our kids all the time,
why not for our co-workers?
Celebrate safety
We could discuss what we can do to celebrate when we do have
our co-workers working safely. For example when we play team sports we
encourage team members to cheer on their teammates. Rarely at work do we use
this technique, even though we know how well it works when we’re playing
sports. When we see our fellow workers wearing the right personal protective
equipment, do we even mention it?
I hope this gives you some ideas about your next safety
meeting or discussion, because if we can improve our safety discussions we can
improve our safety outcomes.
Alan D. Quilley CRSP is the author of The Emperor Has No
Hard Hat – Achieving REAL Safety Results and the president of Safety Results
Ltd. a Sherwood Park, Alberta OH&S consulting company. You can reach him at
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