Safety Management Series – Same Old Safety Meetings? Make Them Different!
<br />By Alan Quilley</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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!</p> <p><strong></strong><strong>Energy / barrier discussion</strong></p> <p>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?</p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong></strong><strong>Incident imaging</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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:</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong></strong><strong>Safe activators</strong></p> <p>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?</p> <p><strong></strong><strong>Celebrate safety</strong></p> <p>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?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alan_Quilley <br /><a href="http://ezinearticles.com/?Safety-Management-Series---Same-Old-Safety-Meetings?-Make-Them-Different!&id=7632199" target="_new">http://EzineArticles.com/?Safety-Management-Series---Same-Old-Safety-Meetings?-Make-Them-Different!&id=7632199</a>
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