The Value of Safety Meetings for Safety Management

The Value of a Safety Meeting
Communication is key with workers on a jobsite to convey health, safety and environmental concerns. One of the best ways to ensure the distribution of crucial information and collect feedback is through regularly scheduled safety meetings.

The value of a safety meeting is that it allows employees to discuss workplace hazards and control measures for the work being performed. These meetings can also provide an opportunity to share the status of changing conditions such as weather that can affect the way workers perform their job. Changes in conditions may require refresher training on safe work practices or additional personal protective equipment.

The Format of a Safety Meeting
Safety meetings can take many forms, such as a formal management meeting in the corporate office, a group WebEx, jobsite toolbox talk, site orientation or reviews of job hazard analyses in a lunch tent. Regardless of the form they take, these meetings allow a critical message to be delivered and those receiving it to provide feedback.

Safety Meeting Topics
To get full value from a safety meeting, it should address a specific training subject, discuss recent events and any required corrections, and recognize favorable performance by an individual or crew.

Keeping employees in the loop helps keep them safe and up to date on company or worksite events, helping them feel part of the process. Sharing corrective actions, lessons learned and positive recognition also helps to raise morale and strengthen safety culture.

When to Hold Safety Meetings
A workplace can have many moving parts and changing factors, including variations in working conditions, new companies or workers on site, the occurrence of an incident or near miss, and/or newly identified hazards. In any of these cases, gathering those working on a site for a quick meeting is usually the quickest way to share a message.

Orientations
Whenever a project begins that requires new companies and workers to come on an operator’s site, there’s typically a site orientation for each worker to ensure they understand the hazards unique to that site. Orientations can also share other pertinent site-specific information, such as emergency and evacuation procedures and alarms that must be followed. These safety meetings can be in person or delivered through computer-based trainings like an online training tool.

Incidents and Near Misses
If a serious incident occurs there can be a stand down meeting called at the host facility where all work ceases and details are communicated to all on site.

A post-investigation meeting for an incident or near miss is key to explain the contributing factors to the workforce and assure workers that the company is actively addressing and mitigating risk factors. These meetings allow the company to share lessons learned and answer questions from workers.

Nearly every investigation uncovers corrective actions that need to be assigned to responsible parties and tracked to completion. Sharing the progress and completion of corrective actions back to the field workers can alleviate concerns and provide an opportunity for workers to provide feedback.

Let ISN Help
Safety meetings are an important instrument in keeping individuals, crews and a worksite safe, and conducting them on a regular basis can pay high dividends for safety and safety culture.

An organization’s safety culture is critical to improving safety performance and reducing serious incidents. Learn more about how we can help assess your safety culture with ISN’s consulting arm, Monarch®.