3 Tips To Revolutionize Safety Meetings

The Safety Meeting is the most important tool in helping employees to buy-in to safety, quickly.

tips to revolutionize safety meetings kevin burns safety speaker

Stop thinking that safety meetings are a legal requirement. It's bigger than that. How your people approach safety meetings is the same way they approach safety. How you approach safety meetings is evident to in how they are perceived.

If you skip over the idea that safety meetings are a part of your overall safety marketing strategy, you will struggle to get your employees to buy into safety at a deep, personal level. Until employees buy-in, you will expend great effort in policing your people into compliance. If you want to chase the compliance model, you can’t miss a day of enforcement or someone is going to get hurt. But when they buy-in to safety, the need for policing disappears. They become a self-policing, engaged group of workers.

The safety meeting is the best large-scale strategy to impact many minds at once. You have a captive audience. Don’t squander that opportunity. Don’t assume that just because they’ve showed up and you’ve prepared an endless assault of PowerPoint slides, please don’t think that you have their attention. You do not. You have their tolerance. You must earn their attention.

Here are three strategies that can help revolutionize your safety meetings right away:

1Go Off-site - Take the safety meeting away from the workplace. Change perspectives on the importance of safety - while combining it with a degree of fun. A change of scenery is a great way to shake off the rust and make employees feel re-energized and refocused on safety. Get them out of their PPE and their routines and make them clean up for the safety meeting.

All work, all serious and no play can get old fast. Safety is supposed to be enjoyable, rewarding and fun. Meeting in a relaxed atmosphere can promote that feeling. When people are relaxed, they uncover ideas and spark inspiration. When people begin to discuss safety in an informal manner, that’s when the ROI of your safety meeting pays handsome dividends (tweet this). That’s when buy-in occurs.

2Change The Perception Of Safety Meetings - You might think that people are coming to the safety meeting willing to learn, but they’re not. They are being forced to be there. And because they weren’t successful in finding a way to skip the meeting altogether, they are braced-for-boredom. Safety meetings are not fun. They are not exciting. If they were, there would be a groundswell of lobbying for more safety meetings - and to make them longer.

But, who says you’re not allowed to have fun at a safety meeting? Sure, safety is serious. But ask yourself; would you rather have an employee enjoy having fun with safety or resisting it because it’s boring? Make it fun. Give away some swag. Celebrate and recognize the really good safety performers. Find a high-energy person to MC your safety meeting. Shorten up the presentations. Give your people time to talk about what was just presented before you hit them with more. Keep the interaction high and the boring presenters off of the stage (do not even think about bending a little on this point).

3Celebrate Safety As A Wellness Strategy - Your company-wide, feel-good staff wellness days must be replaced by safety-and-wellness days - where the focus is on safety, wellness, health and teamwork within a safe environment. Help people make safe and healthy choices that will benefit themselves and their performance. Safety is more than just mindless compliance and wearing of PPE. Safety is an attitude and a lifestyle choice. Stop treating it like simple compliance. Your people are tired of being scolded. They want to be inspired and motivated to safety.

If you want to change the safety culture within your company, it starts with not how you do safety, but by how you celebrate safety. Staff are more likely to act safe if they feel safe and if they feel that their safety is valued by the company.

Yes, this means you have to put time, energy, thought and planning into your safety meetings. If you want your people to get excited about safety, they have to first get excited about the safety meeting. This is where the large-scale buy-in takes place. Get good at your meetings.

Let’s have a conversation about having me wrap up your safety day with a high-energy, entertaining and relevant safety presentation that gets the buy-in process started. Call me and let’s talk.

As a safety keynote speaker for 15 years, I’ve seen great meetings and dull ones. I want to help your next safety meeting or stand-down be outstanding.

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Topics: safety speaker, safety meeting, safety buy-in