Effective Steps to Ensure Efficient Safety Meetings

Safety meetings can be an ideal opportunity to enhance safety in your workplace and address different safety issues affecting your workforce. Ensure to inform every member who needs to be in the meeting prior to the meeting time and day. You should also have a regular schedule for the meeting and let the employees be aware of the dates, but you can also send reminders when the time comes. Below are the effective steps that you can follow for effective safety meetings.

1. Go for Timely and Pertinent Content

At each safety meeting, you’ll need to choose what to talk about. This depends on the challenges facing your workplace and the current safety issues. For instance, if your business just encountered an incident or near miss, you can choose to talk about the causes of the incidents and address the necessary corrective measures. Some of your employees may also be negligent to wear the necessary protective equipment or they could be wearing wrong equipment for the job. Talking about such issues as soon as possible will ensure the relevant measures are taken before it’s too late.

You can also develop timely and effective safety content from recent updates in health and safety regulations or company safety policies. You’ll hardly lack what to talk about in your meetings. The only problem that you may face is deciding what topics to prioritise. While you can address more than one topic in a single meeting, it is best to stick to one topic per meeting to avoid information overload. The employees will be more likely to remember the information if delivered in small bits. You may decide to spread the topics over a long period.

2. Choose the Best Method of Delivery

Once you’ve identified the topic to talk about, you’ll need to decide on the method of delivering the information to your workforce. You may opt for discussions, demonstrations, or start by giving talks followed by discussions or question-and-answer sessions. Normally, meetings are effective when employees interact among themselves and with their superiors. Experts say that workers are more likely to remember more of what they see than what they read or hear. You can include hands-on practice in your presentations, whenever appropriate. You can also use visuals, diagrams, pictures, word-charts, and short videos.

If possible, show your employees how to follow a procedure or operate particular equipment and let them practice rather than just telling them. Focus on involving your employees in your presentation as much as possible. In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it may be challenging to get your employees to interact with one another. However, you can consider installing barriers for safe distancing in your business to help ensure your workforce maintains safe distance during the meetings and when working.

3. Pick the Right Location

Your method of presentation should dictate the location of your meetings. If the meeting involves a demonstration of how to safely operate new equipment, for instance, you can request the responsible workers to assemble near the equipment. If the demonstration is about safe lifting techniques, you can take the workers to where the items are and there’s sufficient space for the workers to spread out and practice. Also, if you are talking about an incident or a near-miss, it’s logical to plan the meeting at the scene of the incident for proper demonstrating.