The most effective safety meetings are the most simple and direct. Don’t try to educate your workforce on the entire safety program at once. Emphasize one important issue during every safety meeting.

An ideal length of time for a safety meeting is 20–45 minutes. Any longer than that and you’ll start to lose the audience’s attention. Any shorter and you may not be able to discuss the issue in sufficient depth.

Your workers aren’t just the audience for your safety meetings—they should also take part in making the meetings happen. Ask employees for topic suggestions. Collect questions before the meeting. Have a member of your team give a demonstration, tell a story, or lead a discussion. These practices will ensure the meetings are relevant and specific to the people they need to reach.

Safety meetings can and should be fun. Try out a variety of media and approaches. Why not have employees role-play or engage in a simulated safety scenario? Humor goes a long way as well, but be sure it’s appropriate to the topic, and use it to draw attention to your message rather than distract from it.

Make sure to record the relevant details of every safety meeting: when it happened, what it was about, who led it, which employees attended, and what activities attendees engaged in. This will help you track the results so you can improve future safety meetings and other elements of your safety program, such as training. It also gives you material to present to an OSHA inspector or other regulatory authority interested in your safety program.

Safety and compliance experts, like the ones here at KPA, can help you plan, design, and conduct effective safety meetings. Leverage our experience, powerful software, and award-winning training to bring your safety meetings to the next level—and bring your incident rates down to zero.