Safety meeting topics

AKBill

AKBill

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AKBill
Every month I am expected to run a safety meeting. We have a safety meeting every week on dayshift and nightshift.

I work in an underground hard rock metal mine (lead, silver, zinc and gold) and maintain underground equipment, (drills, bolters, haul trucks, loaders and support equipment). There is also a surface shop that takes care of trucks, loaders and support equipment. Our typical crew is 32 mechanics total underground and surface.

Lately I'm having a hard time finding topics to talk about. Looking for fresh ideas to use during our safety meetings. I usually use a power point presentation with videos.

Thanks.
 
Perhaps you should get a councilor or social worker to talk to the workers about getting in touch with their feelings. Believe it or not this sort of thing actually boosts safety.
 
How about personal safety when they are out carousing in the drinking establishments late night after their shifts?

If you drive, don't drink. If you drive to the bar and drink, call me. And I'll call you a cab.

-First Sergeant Franks
 
steingar said:
Perhaps you should get a councilor or social worker to talk to the workers about getting in touch with their feelings. Believe it or not this sort of thing actually boosts safety.
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Not a bad ideal. 1/2 the folks that work in the mine live in camp when they are working. We take a 40 minute boat ride to an island and a 40 minute bus ride to the mine. I travel back and forth daily, boat leaves 5am sharp and returns around 6:30pm.

Work schedules are 2 weeks on 2 weeks off or 2 weeks on 1 week off.

Something like you suggest could be a benefit to moral.
 
Do a review (yourself) of all accidents in that field in the US over the last 10 years and gear your talk/presentation towards that
 
"Safety Meeting" means a whole different thing on a dropzone.
 
years ago I was a maintenance engineer in a pulp and paper mill. We had regular meetings like that, and even did daily mini-meetings with our little team. I was doing all my flight training back in those days and drew hard from my flying studies.... aviation magazines, etc... I used to keep a file of magazine clippings from personal stuff but also from trade magazines just for ideas for future meetings.
It's been so long for me thinking about that stuff I'm drawing kindof a numb blank....

hmmm....the recent thread about making your own checklist could spawn several topics....
- dangers of deviating from the manufacturer's recommendations
- different ways of keeping your thoughts organized
- is a check list a to-do list to follow as an instruction....or is it meant for review after you've done the task just as a double check...
- tunnel vision in formed habits...and seeing what you want to see rather than what is really there.
- saying vs touching vs doing
 
I know nothing of your work experience and environment but since this is an aviation group maybe taking from some of the dangerous attitudes that can affect pilots: get their itis(maybe get it done itis); resignation; machismo; over confidence or complacency - especially with repetitive tasks. FWIW


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Keep it pertinent, keep it real, keep it brief. At least the more frequent ones...

Show a pic of a guy that used a cheater bar on a wrench and got hurt, bad.

Show a picture of a guy who didn't use a face shield or safety glasses.

There's a safety vid of a guy named Charlie (not me) that turned the wrong valve and started a he!!uva fire... He became a human torch and lived to tell about it.

Confined spaces like mines with flammable fuels, Carbon monoxide...

And, from my experience... Don't be the guy who talks the talk and don't walk the walk.
They gotta see you do it safe... Every time.

The plant used to tell us to work safe... If we actually did work safe, production would have dropped easily 20%. And they couldn't have that...

Mean it.
 
“Guys. No one is keen to hear another safety lecture. I promise this won’t be like that. However - every year one of us is killed or injured and we should know why so that we can all go home at the end of our shift instead of to the hospital or the morgue. Let’s look at a few of these accidents together and you can tell me what you can do to not end up in a gurney or body bag like these guys”
 
bGW4afE.jpg
Just pass a few of these out....you'll either improve safety.... or not be in charge of the meeting anymore.....

On a more serious note, one of the things our local grain elevator cooperative did was introduce an incentivized 'near miss' reporting system. The reported dangerous situations are then used in safety meetings throughout the company.

Something else I find valuable on our vol. Fire dept. Is practicing skills we don't use often, but could be life saving. We just practiced shifting our SCBA's to squeeze through a wall on Monday night. I often find things I thought I had down have gotten rusty with time. Kind of like practicing an engine out situation in the airplane. Im sure underground mining has a LOT of things like that.
 
Just put a few of these signs around.....:confused2:

funny-chinese-sign-translation-fails-4.jpg


funny-chinese-sign-translation-fails-8.jpg
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
“Guys. No one is keen to hear another safety lecture. I promise this won’t be like that. However - every year one of us is killed or injured and we should know why so that we can all go home at the end of our shift instead of to the hospital or the morgue. Let’s look at a few of these accidents together and you can tell me what you can do to not end up in a gurney or body bag like these guys”
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Very nice. Except I would replace "accident" with "incident", "injury", or "death".

Using the word "accident" implies it was beyond the control of the participants to prevent the incident.

There are literally very few accidents in daily life. Driving drunk and crash your car? Not an accident. Following too closely in traffic and rear-end someone when they stopped short? Not an accident. Took a corner too fast and did not see the stalled vehicle until it was too late to stop? Also not an accident.

Look around the country at the law enforcement agencies that have an investigative branch for vehicle collisions. Most of them have removed the word "Accident" from their titles.
 
Tell them Bessie Coleman was killed by an errant wrench.

Then show photos of their messy toolboxes.

LOL.
 
smv said:
Using the word "accident" implies it was beyond the control of the participants to prevent the incident.
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I actually think it implies more 'unintentional'..... not so much "beyond control".
just for grins
actually googled a definition:
1.
an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.
"he had an accident at the factory"
2.
an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause.

Not wanting to be argumentative....rather just to consider from a different direction.
 
Brad W said:
I actually think it implies more 'unintentional'..... not so much "beyond control".
just for grins
actually googled a definition:
1.
an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.
"he had an accident at the factory"
2.
an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause.

Not wanting to be argumentative....rather just to consider from a different direction.
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That was actually pretty much my entire point.

"Unexpectedly" is the total failure of a mechanical part, despite all the proper inspections and maintenance.
"Unexpectedly" is a meteor striking the aircraft in flight. (an extreme example, of course)
"Unexpectedly" is sucking a flock of Canada Geese into both engines (Although this one is borderline, depending on the area and time of year)

There should be nothing unexpected about crashing short of the runway when you pushed your fuel reserves and did not take an opportunity to stop for fuel along the way. That is not an accident.

There should be nothing unexpected about crashing into a tree if one is driving drunk. Certainly not an accident.

There should be nothing unexpected about losing an eye if one is using a bench grinder without eye protection. This is not an accident.

There should be nothing unexpected about becoming yet another statistic if one takes off into deteriorating weather conditions without the proper training and equipment. This is not an accident.

Take a look around at all the the "accidents" you see... Be they industrial, commercial, in your own home, on the road, or in the air and ask yourself, "Should have the people involved in the sequence of events have expected the outcome they had based upon their behavior leading up to the incident?"

If you are being honest, I bet 99% of the time the answer would be a resounding "YES!"

Edit to Add: As for the "unintentionally" part of the definition, I posit that if someone is acting in such a manner (as indicated in my examples above) as to create the conditions leading to an incident and do not take steps to prevent them, they are, in fact, acting intentionally.
 
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A mandatory weekly meeting that was clearly being 'forced' would furnish me with several of the FAA's dangerous attitudes, mainly leveled at you and management for not questioning their existence.

Can you ask that the meetings be set to a more reasonable cadence, such as monthly? It's entirely reasonable that there are not 52 new and refreshing safety items I wish to hear about annually, and it would be better for my safety, mental state, and health to skip the death by powerpoint altogether unless it had a good reason for being.
 
As a former "Safety Officer" I would begin each work week with a company-wide "Monday Mayhem" email. Unlike 99.9% of all safety related emails, these would not contain a single bit of text. I would submit, without comment or critique, a photograph dealing with matters of safety. Typically they were pictures of incidents, people doing things without regard to safety, or unsafe situations. Occasionally they were graphic but most of the time they elicited a "W.T.F??" response.

Every week was a different, previously unused, picture. If your Google-Foo is strong, one can find literally 1000s of applicable photos.

The intent was to try to get folks to start the week thinking of safety without forcing them into "another damn safety meeting". Feedback from the employees on the Monday Mayhem email was always positive.

The images did not need to have anything to do with the industry in which we worked. This is an example of one of the pictures I used:

VH-KBZ-sliced-2.jpg
 
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When safety meetings were my responsibility in an earlier job, occasionally I would discuss home safety. The topic can have many useful recommendations, the primary ones for me were fire extinguishers, smoke alarms, and carbon monoxide detectors.

I tried to come up with a non-work related safety topic every two months. Vehicles are a good one, particularly seat belts and car seats.
 
schmookeeg said:
A mandatory weekly meeting that was clearly being 'forced' would furnish me with several of the FAA's dangerous attitudes, mainly leveled at you and management for not questioning their existence.

Can you ask that the meetings be set to a more reasonable cadence, such as monthly? It's entirely reasonable that there are not 52 new and refreshing safety items I wish to hear about annually, and it would be better for my safety, mental state, and health to skip the death by powerpoint altogether unless it had a good reason for being.
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Well in the past we were only required to attend 1 safety meeting a month. Today it is mandatory every week.

We also are required to participate in daily stretching exercises at the beginning of shift and mid day thru the shift

When I was stationed in Japan in the early 90's the construction workers would exercise before they started work. I guess the US is 30 years behind the times
 
AKBill said:
Every month I am expected to run a safety meeting. We have a safety meeting every week on dayshift and nightshift.

I work in an underground hard rock metal mine (lead, silver, zinc and gold) and maintain underground equipment, (drills, bolters, haul trucks, loaders and support equipment). There is also a surface shop that takes care of trucks, loaders and support equipment. Our typical crew is 32 mechanics total underground and surface.

Lately I'm having a hard time finding topics to talk about. Looking for fresh ideas to use during our safety meetings. I usually use a power point presentation with videos.

Thanks.
Click to expand...



"Everybody knows that a little safety is good, but a lot more is better."
"There's a difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance you can fix, stupid, not so much."
(The first sentence stated here is stupidity.)

Don't go stupid on your guys, no matter how hard the bean counters and insurance companies push the safety culture. There is a point where it becomes non-productive. If you've run out of topics, you've likely exceeded saturation.

There's good management, and there's not. Your people in the field are fully aware of the risks and dangers on and off the job. You might try backing up and allow them to suggest your topics.

If you play the role of moderator, and allow them the opportunity to direct some of the meetings and topics, you might be surprised what you might learn too. Your people will become much more involved, and tuned in, and that's safety.
 
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