Safety Moments

Plant Managers – Friday – Safety Moments

Do you start every meeting with a safety moment? Do you ask if anyone has a brief safety topic to share? Offer one yourself?

For most meetings, it can be something informal. Just a quick 30-60 second share of something relevant:

• “Turning cold next week – start thinking about prepping for cold weather. Check your tires, bring in your hoses, …”
• “We had a couple near-misses last week with folks getting cut – let’s stay on top of glove use…”
• “Another site reported X – do we have that here? What can we do?”
• “Days are getting shorter. We’re driving here in the dark and school has started back. Bicycles, school buses, pedestrians.”
• “Skunks are out…”
• “Bad weather in the forecast. Make sure you have flashlights, batteries, your car is full of gas, chargers for your phones…”

Morning production meeting or weekly leadership team meeting – “Anybody got a safety moment?” If this isn’t a habit in your plant’s culture (YET) nobody may volunteer the first time, so have one ready.

A formal quarterly meeting – assign someone well in advance to do a safety moment. A couple slides that take 5-10 minutes is good. This could be a review and discussion of a serious incident from another site in your company or somewhere else with a relevant incident. (You are sharing incidents between sites, aren’t you?)

Opening with a quick safety moment is a simple thing to keep safety on folks’ minds. And it’s a good icebreaker to get everyone talking and sharing in a meeting.

Have a good weekend.

Oh. What does that picture have to do with anything? Nothing, but that’s Toby – he was my best bud for the last 13 years. We lost him 4 months ago today. If that’s unprofessional and “inappropriate for LinkedIn”, well, he was the Chief Security Officer for Bridge Technical Services. And he is sorely missed.