Kevin Burns Blog

If your safety meetings are falling apart - employees interrupting, side conversations, someone hijacking the agenda - you've probably already tried the obvious fix.

I've been sitting on this for months. Something that's been bugging me about who gets access to our programs — and who doesn't. Today I did something about it.

Since the onslaught of COVID-19, safety meetings have changed. Well, we hope they have. Most organizations have been connecting with their distanced employees through electronic means. And that includes safety meetings. Most safety professionals would freely admit that safety meetings were done badly before COVID. Taking a bad meeting and putting it online is not the answer.

If you want better participation and engagement at safety meetings, then there are four things you should be talking about at your meetings. Are you talking about them yet?

Don’t waste your one-on-one time with your people enforcing rules. I’ll let you in on a little secret. When employees buy-in to safety, you don’t need to police them anymore. Where you once spent a great deal of time on enforcement, you can now replace with coaching and mentoring. Trust me when I say, coaching and mentoring is infinitely more satisfying.

To improve employee participation in the safety program, clear communications are key. If you are going to communicate something in safety, what do you want to have happen? How exactly do you want your people to participate? Informing people isn’t enough anymore. Your people are already bombarded with, on average, four thousand marketing messages each day. Everywhere they look, they are getting access to another message – competing with your safety message - even as recently as this morning. But let's say that you are above-average in compelling and engaging your people’s attention during a morning safety meeting, as soon as they leave the meeting, they are faced with hundreds more messages that all compete for attention. So, to combat this, you have to be clear.

Are you meeting the needs of your people in safety meetings? How many times have you seen presenters, with 10 minutes of solid information, stretch it into a 90-minute presentation? How does that happen? Here’s how. The person organizing the safety meeting is trying to fill blocks of time instead of developing content that will make a difference to their people.

The safety of others is more important than clinging to your job. Who is benefitting most from you showing up at work each day? Your co-workers or you? The answer to this question illustrates your intent.

We have the best people and the best safety processes more than ever, so you have to wonder why we are still hurting people? For 50 years, safety has been promoted as being all about rules, processes, regulations, paperwork, inspections, reporting. We’ve organized a lot of meetings, and talked far too much about rules, and we’ve endured death by Powerpoint, and tried to get traction on the cutesy slogans, and tired, worn-out clichés. Oh, sure we've developed some new technology but mostly to make it easier to pencil-whip checklists and file reports. There’s not much that has been developed to make safety more engaging, and inspiring, and motivating.

There are two approaches taken to safety meetings and usually both are wrong. This video explores the two most common forms of ineffective safety meeting ... and what to do instead. In this video, you will learn: