3 Strategies To Improve Safety Meetings

1 People Engage With Other People – PowerPoint is not the message. It is a supplementary medium. But people don’t engage with PowerPoint slides. They engage with other people. Besides, PowerPoint is lazy. It’s for people who won’t take the time to create a safety meeting strategy that engages the hearts and minds of employees. PowerPoint bullet points are no more than a shopping list of thoughts you think need to be in the presentation. Most don’t. Instead of an information dump, think of your safety meetings with a Town Hall format. Think discussions versus lectures. Involve them. Ask their opinion. Solicit ideas. Do not let anyone sit silent in a safety meeting. Engage.

2 Keep It Simple. One Idea At A Time – Safety meetings are full of stats and charts and inspection reports and procedures and rules reminders because organizers don’t know what to say so they say all of it. But you don’t have to say all of it. In fact, you need to say very little. You don’t “fill” a safety meeting with stuff. It’s not about filling a time-slot. It’s about making sure that you advance a new idea. The point is to make your people better. Not just better-informed. Anyone can dump a load of information. But only the effective safety leaders can help people become better safety performers. Protect your people from being exposed to too much or conflicting information. Plan your meeting: it’s theme, points of discussion, content and consistency of message. Shorten the meeting with one thought at a time. Stick the supplementary information (anything you would stick on those tiny lines of type on PowerPoint slides) into newsletters, emails, etc. Keep it simple. Keep it short and tight. Focus on what you want to have happen. Then, move on to the final point….

3 Create A Call-To-Action – What’s the point of having a meeting if you don’t want something to come out of it? If you’re going to have a meeting, there needs to be a call-to-action. What do you want your people to do better, more of or differently at the end of the meeting? Start your planning at the end of the meeting and work backwards. Figure out what you want them to do, then point everything in the meeting at accomplishing that one thing. Everything you do and talk about in the meeting should support the call-to-action; each slide, point-of-discussion, speech, instruction or handout. Your people must do something with the information.

If all you want to do is inform them or remind them of procedures and rules, put it in a memo or email. But if you’re going to bring employees to a meeting, involve them, engage them, ask them. It’s their meeting too. Make it valuable for them. When you keep that purpose in mind, you’ll have less difficulty in figuring out what to say in your safety meetings. You will move from boring safety meetings to effective and engaging safety meetings.

Source : Kevin Burns