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!

If you want to change the way that you think, try spending a day with an astronaut. 

Unfortunately, less than 500 people have had the space experience so our chances of doing this are indeed rare. Let’s face it, looking at our big blue marble of a planet through the window of a space vehicle is bound to change the way you think about a great number of human challenges.

We still don’t get it he says!

Alan Quilley has an edge. He seems ticked off  with most of our “business an usual” approaches to safety — mainly because it just isn’t working.

Speaking to a packed auditorium of safety professionals at the CSSE conference in Victoria, B.C., the bearded and bespectacled Quilley is animated and engaged and appears relaxed and comfortable up on stage before his peers — even though he’s about to take direct aim at them. He says he’s not afraid to be the person who points out our flaws and helps spark the debate about change. “I want to be that voice,” says Quilley. “We are not doing very well.”