adminThere is no better occasion to address potential hazards and reinforce safe working habits than in a safety meeting regarding organizational safety. In addition, such meetings provide an ideal opportunity to foster a culture of safety.
However, employees perceive such meetings as just another corporate procedure and ignore the safety instructions. Therefore, an effective appointment is essential for understanding the criticality behind such meetings.
It is of utmost importance that one considers the five critical aspects — content, manner, location, reinforcement, and follow-up — for conducting a smooth safety meeting to make the most out of it.
Here’s an ultimate guide for conducting effective safety meetings at work:
What is a Safety Meeting?
A safety meeting is a session conducted to remind everyone in the workplace of the safe practices they have already learned or introduce them to new techniques, new types of equipment, or new regulations.
The main objective of such a meeting is to educate management of the risks associated and get safety to the forefront by encouraging active participation.
How Do Safety Meetings Benefit The Organization?
Safety work meetings may seem like another corporate duty, but it has a multitude of practical benefits no employer should miss:
1. Safety Meetings Map the Overall EHS Program
A well-functioning EHS program is a product of strategic planning and development, which includes forming policies and controls, assigning projects, roles, duties, and follow-through. Such discussions can be a part of safety meetings.
2. Safety Meetings Raise Awareness and Address Key Safety Topics
Annual meetings don’t suffice when addressing a timely concern becomes the need of the hour. Safety meetings help cater to such conditions and keep the workplace environment safe, healthy, and productive. Choose key topics like heat stroke safety, burn prevention, fall safety, and more to address the concerns at every meeting.
3. Safety Meetings Help Keep Track of Budget and Resources
Often many bottlenecks impede smooth functioning in the organization. It can be caused due to failed allocation of resources. Safety meetings thereby make the best venue for addressing such concerns.
4. Safety Meetings Improve Engagement
Such meetings allow everyone in the workplace to have a say and raise their concerns, challenges, and suggestions. It is one of the best approaches to improve engagement and to get people on board with safety.
Actionable Ways to Make Every Safety Meeting Impactful
There are challenges while delivering safety presentations to employees. One such major challenge is keeping the employee’s attention while providing the information they need to retain.
They are often sleepy, distracted by their peers, popping emails, texts, or generally believing it’s a waste of time. Below are some best practices that should be adopted for conducting an impactful safety meeting:
1. Schedule the Meeting in Advance and Plan the Content Well
Setting the meeting as the agenda of one of the workdays proves to be a great way to get the required attention. Scheduling the day and setting reminders take the discussion one step closer to achieving a full house.
Another essential aspect includes planning the topics of the meeting well in advance as it ensures that the sessions are thoroughly aligned with the organization’s health and safety goals and the overall business strategy.
2. Use Visual Aids For Better Explanation
Use a variety of techniques to explain the safety protocols than just putting together a simple presentation. For example, use real equipment or involve exciting hands-on activities to demonstrate usage of equipment better. Such ways help the workers get their practice in real-time and make room for on-the-spot corrections.
3. Assess Employee’s Understanding
Delivering an impactful meeting is not the major objective of such a meeting, but ensuring that the knowledge is imparted well. Take up activities to ensure that employees understand each topic 100%. Such activities include:
- Engage employees to summarise key concepts
- Encouraging employees to use hand signals such as thumbs up/down
- Encourage employees to narrate real experiences
4. Focus On Feedbacks
Such face-to-face meetings allow collecting feedback, inputs, or suggestions from the captive audience. Therefore, incorporate employee feedback into the safety meeting preparation process. This process should also be handled informally through talks with the workers. It’s an effective way to improve the quality of conducting safety sessions.
Plan Effective Safety Meetings with Pulse
Safety meetings can prove to be a powerful strategy in drawing an effective EHS strategy, provided one knows how to use them effectively.
Using tools like EHS software can help chalk out the right agenda of the meeting and provide support statistics to aid attendees in understanding the goal of the meeting better. Such software also makes it simple to track and log meeting data so you can monitor impact over time.
Pulse is one such focused, world-class compliance and auditing tool that fosters a culture of EHS excellence. Pulse offers:
- A modern interface
- High-level security
- Powerful integration capacity
- Easy-to-use interface
- Mobile-ready for instant collaboration
All these features (and many more) ensure you and your employees can log incidents, generate reports, close actions, check analytics and overall provide the best possible compliance and management. With Pulse, make your safety work meetings to next-level productive.
To learn more, visit our website, or sign up for our free 30-day trial TODAY!