Posted on by Barry Spud

Take 5 for Safety: Five Minute Daily Safety Meetings

Take 5 for Safety: Five Minute Daily Safety Meetings

There are a few ways to Take 5 for safety: You could take five minutes to do a safety drill or take five minutes to surprise an employee with a safety pop quiz. You may also wish to take five minutes out of every monthly meeting to address a safety concern, or you could take five minutes every morning to reiterate safety. Let’s look at one of these ideas in depth, the five minute daily safety meetings.

Five Minutes Can Save Lives

The idea of taking five minutes every day to address safety concerns may be the best Take 5 idea if your company has some pretty serious safety concerns of which to be aware every day. Some of the more hazardous workplaces include construction zones, factories and welding shops, and addressing safety in each of these workplaces can save lives. Let’s look at a few examples to better illustrate the idea of a five minute daily safety meeting.

Construction

Construction zones are notorious for being hazardous, but a Take 5 approach to construction safety may help workers remember to stay safe. For instance, in this construction example, let’s say the crew found a safety concern at the end of the previous day’s work; A support post in a renovation was found to be unstable. The next morning, you could remind the crew to fashion a new support column before allowing anyone to work beneath the structure. The reminder would only take a few minutes but could save many workers from serious harm.

Factory Work

In a factory work environment, Take 5 may help you quickly address safety at the beginning of each shift. You could gather the employees around every day to address safety concerns. Depending upon the factory environment, you may wish to address a new safety concern every day, address safety protocols for new equipment, or simply reiterate the most important safety procedures. For example, in an environment where safety hinges on wearing construction hats, you could take a few minutes to simply group chant a safety slogan, like “A hard hat on your head keeps you from being dead.”

Welding

The welding environment is another environment where Take 5 could help you increase your workplace safety. In this example, let’s look at Take 5 as a five minute tack on to a daily meeting. If you and your workers meet every morning to address the plan for the day, a daily meeting is the perfect opportunity to also address safety. After you address the day’s business, you could simply tack on, “Remember to be safe out there – wear your shields.” Not even five minutes, this short Take 5 reminder could prevent accidents.

Although the three work environments we addresses are higher risk environments, the Take 5 daily meeting idea can be applied to many workplaces. Even though the Take 5 idea is simple, daily reminders about the hazards in any work environment can help workers keep safety in mind.

Barry Spud

Barry Spud

Safety Crusader, Zero Harm Zealot and Compliance Controller at Everything Safety
Barry Spud
What is a Safety Spud? Lets look at a few more spud head activities in risk and safety: 1. Coming on to site saying there is a safety issue when in fact there’s no such thing, it’s a political issue. 2. ‘Falling apart’ when people make choices that we think are stupid because they won’t do as we ‘tell’ them. Then we put on the angry face and think that overpowering others creates ownership. 3. Putting on the zero harm face, presenting statistics, knowing it has nothing to do with culture, risk or safety. 4. Putting on the superman (hazardman) suit and pretending to be the saviour of everything, this is good spud head cynic stuff. 5. Thinking that everyone else is a spud head except me. 6. Thinking there’s such a thing as ‘common’ sense and using such mythology to blame and label others. 7. Accepting safety policies and processes that dehumanize others. 8. Blaming, ego-seeking, grandstanding and territory protecting behind the mask of safety. 9. Thinking that risk and safety is simple when in fact it is a wicked problem. Denying complexity and putting your spud head in the sand. 10. Continually repeating the nonsense language and discourse of risk aversion that misdirect people about risk, safety, learning and imagination.

Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below