Steps To An Effective Safety Meeting
 Feb. 5, 2009

Maintaining a safe workplace is a priority for all manufacturers. Beyond the obvious objective of avoiding work-related injuries, there are collateral advantages such as avoiding the indirect costs of an industrial injury and increased productivity for your operation.

Safety meetings often times become a routine obligation for the employer that has questionable value to the employees. When these meetings lack direction and purpose your employers will wonder why it was even scheduled.  Effective safety meetings require planning. By developing a safety meeting plan and following a few simple guidelines, safety meetings can be interesting, informative and productive.

Step One - Evaluate
Take a look at the work-related injuries you've experienced over the last couple of years and the near misses and identify the costs.  Are their trends? If there are no identifiable trends, examine your exposures and the inherent hazards of your operation.  Oftentimes this analysis will help you develop a safety meeting topic outline for the quarter or year.

Step Two - Purpose
Once you've outlined your topics for the planning period identify a purpose each meeting.  Quite often there may be more than one purpose for a meeting.  By identifying the purpose of the meeting you have identified why the meeting is necessary.  As you develop meeting components you’ll want to refer back to the meeting purpose to ensure the meetings objectives are supported by the topics included in the session.

Step Three – Content
Develop your content.  Ensure that you have adequate time to present your topic and determine how it can be effectively
presented.  Allow yourself sufficient time to research the topic and gather information and suggestions from those who have expertise in the subject matter.  Depending on the complexity of the material it may be prudent to have someone who has
in-depth knowledge of the topic attend the meeting as your guest speaker.

Step Four - Format
A critical component that has a marked impact on the success of your meeting is how the material will be presented.  Creating and maintaining interest should be a consistent priority in safety meeting planning.  The use of multimedia can enhance the
delivery and help maintain the attention of the audience.  Ensure that the materials used in the meeting are topical, readable,
accurate and current. 

Step Five - Agenda
Develop a meeting agenda.  Ensure that their sufficient time for discussion on the most important topics to be covered during the meeting.  Group interaction through discussion, as well as, question and answer sessions often stimulates interest that
provides feedback as to the participants level of understanding about the meeting topic. Also, make certain that the meeting is scheduled to accommodate the largest number of participants and that the agenda is sent out well in advance of the meeting to allow participants to review the content.

Step Six – Follow-up
The final, but critically important step of the meeting process is to document anything that requires follow-up and report
progress on that required follow-up to the meeting participants.  Do the participants understand their role in any action plan that has been developed at the meeting?  Creating a consensus on the need to address a safety issue will foster a sense of
ownership amongst your employees that will form a positive attitude amongst participants for your next safety meeting.

For more information on developing safety meetings contact the CMTA Group Workers’ Compensation Program at (916) 498-3332 or by email wcgroup@cmta.net.

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