Regular safety meetings can contribute to building a culture of safety at your company, but not if it is seen as an additional task or one more hoop to jump through. The workday is busy enough without adding meetings to everyone’s calendars.
Here are a few suggestions to keep your company’s safety meetings effective and productive.
- Safety committees take work to be effective. It’s not enough to meet on a regular basis. There may be some research or consulting that needs to be done into what the best safety practices are in your industry.
- Collaborate with employees. Don’t just make it the safety committee management’s job or one person’s role. Bringing employees into all aspects of the safety program has been shown to increase effectiveness and employee buy-in. If there’s buy-in, there is more likely to be acceptance of all workplace safety practices.
- Keep an open mind to new suggestions. Employees actually working the job may have a perspective that management doesn’t have. Likewise, research into what other similar size companies in your industry are doing may reveal effective methods to keep everyone safe.
- Don’t just talk about safety but be prepared to take action. Identifying a problem but not being prepared to address it may undo the safety culture that you are trying to build in your company. Worse, inaction on an identified problem may be seen as negligence and leave the company in an even more potentially liable position.
- It may help to make a checklist of roles that each member of the safety committee can undertake. The work can be made lighter when the burden is shared.
- Once started, keep moving. The worst thing for building a safety culture is continual starts and stops for the safety committee. Once committed, keep working. Everything may not be perfect right away, but working toward that goal will be worth it.