What Is a Safety Moment? – A safety moment is a brief talk about a specific, safety-oriented topic at the beginning of a meeting. A safety moment is usually between 5–10 minutes long and may also be called “safety minutes” or “safety chats.” Teams can approach these conversations in different ways to maximize the impact. But there are a few common aspects to most companies’ safety moments:
Keep them short, usually lasting approximately five minutes and never more than 10Focus on a single topic rather than jumping around or overloading participants with informationOrient the safety moment toward your team’s upcoming day or week, not long-term planningUse safety moments to support a positive safety culture through clear, concise, and engaging communication
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What is considered a safety moment?
A Safety Moment is a brief safety talk about a specific subject at the beginning of a meeting. Also known as safety minutes or safety chats, these talks can be done in a variety of ways, but are typically a brief (2-5 minute) discussion on a safety related topic.
| Safety Culture Updated 1/4/19 | Chemical and Compressed Gas Safety Updated 1/4/19 | Emergencies Updated 1/4/19 |
| Field Research Safety Updated 1/4/19 | Handling Waste Updated 1/4/19 | Hazard Control Updated 1/4/19 |
| Material Handling, Ergonomics, Lifting, Ladders Updated 1/4/19 | Personal Protective Equipment Updated 1/8/19 | Best Practices Updated 1/4/19 |
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ul> Resources used:
UF EH&S:
ehs.ufl.edu
HWCOE Safety Office:
eng.ufl.edu/safety
University of Minnesota Joint Safety Team:
http://www.jst.umn.edu/safety-moments
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab:
Yale University Joint Safety Team:
https://jst.chem.yale.edu/resources/safety-moments
The Ohio State University:
https://chemistry.osu.edu/safety/jst/minutes
University of California, Irvine EH&S:
https://www.ehs.uci.edu/salerts/
“3 Ways to Make your Safety Moments More Personal”
What is a safety moment at the start of a meeting?
What is a Safety Moment? – A Safety Moment is intended to be a short 3-5 minute conversation about safety delivered at the start of a meeting and is an opportunity to raise safety awareness on a personal level. A Safety Moment doesn’t have to be a formal presentation so take the opportunity to get creative! Examples of styles and ways to present your Safety Moments along with some topics are given in the Safety Moments library, or you can choose your own.
What is the purpose of a safety moment?
Why you should hold safety moments – The purpose of a safety moment is to put employees in a safety-oriented mindset. Usually, a safety moment reminds employees about a safety policy or protocol they already know. In just a few minutes, you can cover:
An overview of your workplace’s policy How the policy keeps them safe The consequences of not following the policy Any questions or concerns raised by employees
A safety moment isn’t the best time to present brand-new information or detailed safety training. Instead, use these brief but valuable opportunities to regularly expose your employees to safety basics. By doing so, you’ll communicate that their safety is your top priority, and build a strong safety culture over time.
How long should a safety message be?
If you’re in charge of writing the next safety message or safety slogan for your company’s safety initiatives, you know that you’ve got a challenge ahead of you. After all, most safety slogans become invisible and ineffective pretty quickly. Only create a safety message that is part of a workplace safety campaign where people receive training to change their behaviour.
Otherwise. putting a poster on the wall with a new slogan is as helpful as putting a sticker on your car that says “Baby on board”. No-one will pay much attention (or really care!). In the book, Transform your Safety Communication, it goes through in lots of detail all of the steps to create a workplace safety message.
If you want to get access to some safety communication fundamentals, download a free chapter here, Otherwise, let’s go into some easy steps for creating a safety message. To ensure your safety message is sticky, here are seven important tips: 1. Use positive language – Avoid creating a slogan that focuses on behaviour that you don’t want.
- Instead, write a safety message that conveys what you want people to do.
- For example a negative slogan for height safety is “Don’t fall for it”.
- Using more positive language, a more appropriate version is “A harness is better than a hearse”.
- While this might have negative connotations, it still focuses on what you want the person to do, rather than the wrong behaviour.3.
Keep it short (and tweet) – In this age of Twitter, being able to write in 140 characters or less helps you to distill your message. It’s the same with writing a safety message, just try and encapsulate it in 12 words or less.4. Avoid jargon – Make sure the sentence flows easily.
Avoid acronyms and words that not everyone will understand (use the test: will my mum get this one?).5. Contain a surprise – Common sense is the enemy of sticky safety messages. When our brain’s guessing machine fails, it wants to work out why it was unable to guess. This surprise grabs our attention, so that we can be prepared in the future.
By trying to work out what went wrong, our brain is more likely to remember the information. Here’s a good example (a personal fave): Hug your kids at home, but belt them in the car. Slogans that contain the obvious will be ignored Examples are: “Play it safe” and “Be aware, take care”. 6. Use visuals – Incorporating visuals with your safety message is a powerful way to get the message across. The visual needs to increase understanding, not detract. Here’s a good example. Note that the image shows the right behaviour and the text is located close to the image, so the brain can easily identify what the poster is about (learn more about using visuals at Why using Visuals is so Important ).
It’s also part of a manual handling training campaign where staff went through extensive training. And for potential copyright reasons, we can’t show you any bad posters. But they’re pretty easy to find! 2. Use metaphor s – Metaphors are a powerful way to get people to understand and remember information.
In the book, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, they mention that sticky messages are often metaphors in disguise. Metaphors are about understanding one thing in terms of something else. An example would be for stair safety. Did you know that more people die each year from falling from stairs than they do from being attacked by a shark? 7.
- Play on words – A clever play on words helps to make your safety message just that little bit more memorable.
- This can include rhyming and repeating words in a different order.
- Adding a little bit of fun can make a serious subject more approachable.
- You can see a longer list at 29 Top Catchy Safety Slogans,
Is better to lose one minute in life. than to lose life in a minute. Know safety, no injury. No safety, know injury Lifting’s a breeze when you bend at the knees Once you have created you safety slogan and trained people on the new behaviour that is required, regularly remind staff of the safety message in toolbox meetings and email newsletters etc.
What are items for safety at work?
Personal protective equipment, commonly referred to as ‘PPE’, is equipment worn to minimize exposure to a variety of hazards. Examples of PPE include such items as gloves, foot and eye protection, protective hearing devices (earplugs, muffs) hard hats, respirators and full body suits.
What is an example of a positive safety observation?
Balance Your Positive and Negative Observations – You want to take observations frequently, but you don’t want an overwhelming pile of similar data. To ensure you have a well-rounded data set, emphasize recording at least as many positive observations as negative ones. A negative safety observation is someone use their knees, forget their brace, and lift a box in a way that makes you wince from across the room. Why is balance so important? If you have 250 positive observations and two negative ones, you have a lopsided view of what’s happening on the ground. So, if you go out into the field and spot 20 people lifting boxes using a safe technique, but you don’t record the 10 people who nearly threw their back out, then your data doesn’t give you an accurate picture.
What is an example of a safety issue?
1. Safety Hazards – Present in almost every workplace at one time or another, safety hazards are unsafe conditions that can cause injury or even death, such as:
Spills and tripping hazards (e.g. electrical cords running across a floor) Working from height Machinery-related hazards (forklifts, lockout/tagout, unguarded and moving machinery parts) Electrical hazards (e.g. frayed cords, improper wiring) Confined spaces
What is a critical activity in safety?
SCTA – Safety critical task analysis (SCTA) is a powerful tool in our toolkit and can play a big part in our efforts to make things better and easier. Its purpose is not necessarily to identify opportunities to remove the human from the system, but to ensure the operator is effectively supported via the identification of improvements such as those related to system, equipment, environment and task design, operational arrangements, procedures, and training, which in turn should lead to improved safety, environmental, and cost performance.
In major accident hazard (MAH) industries, managing human failure is a key component of risk management. SCTA concerns the tasks in which human failure could undermine the control of MAH events or affect the mitigation of, or recovery from them. It is the barriers that are established to mitigate MAH risks which are reliant on human performance that are the focus of the assessment.
No matter how well barriers and lines of defence are established, if the impact of the interaction of people with those barriers is not assessed then they may well be defeated due to ineffective inspection, maintenance and operations. As highlighted by the HSE, we need to manage human error “as robustly as technical and engineering measures”.
Table 1 (adapted from Reference 1) presents an overview of the SCTA process.Firstly, how should we go about identifying the safety critical tasks?Table 1: Managing human failure – SCTA process
In some of our projects, the identification of MAHs and barrier risk assessment has been supported by reviews of bowtie analyses and other safety studies as key inputs to the SCTA. In other projects where such studies were unavailable, the initial identification of MAHs was based on attendance at HAZOPs and dedicated workshops which involved subject matter experts and operators who understand the process, the risks and how the work is done in practice.
When assessing the effectiveness of barriers, we have to identify those which are reliant on human performance, as staff will have a key role in the operation, testing and maintenance of barriers. Activities which contribute toward the effectiveness of the barriers are identified as safety critical tasks, as any human errors associated with the execution of these critical tasks could lead, directly or indirectly, to major safety and/or environmental incidents and accidents.
Safety critical tasks can be grouped into three types:
Pre-initiators – maintenance, testing and calibration tasks in which a human failure could lead to the loss of a safety function in a line of protection. Initiators – tasks in which a human failure could lead to the occurrence of a MAH event. Post-initiators – tasks required in response to a MAH event in which a human failure could result in failure to control, mitigate or recover from the event.
From this review, the relevant procedures associated with the control and mitigation of each MAH are identified. It is important that the procedures are those used directly by staff on site rather than reference manuals, training material and policy documentation.
We also need to consider if there are other safety critical tasks which are not covered by procedures and ensure these are clearly defined. Examples of safety critical tasks typically associated with MAH controls are listed in Table 2. On a large site there may be several types of MAH and many safety and environmentally-critical tasks associated with barriers.
This means that the SCTA process can be resource intensive if a quality outcome is to be achieved, so it is important that we focus effort on identifying where the impact of human error would be high, screening and prioritising the identified safety critical tasks to reduce the most significant risks in a cost-effective manner.
The depth of analysis needs to be appropriate to the severity of the consequences of failure of the task. Once a safety critical task inventory is compiled the tasks should be prioritised based on the consequences of task failure and the degree of human involvement. Simple risk matrices with guidance tables are included in Reference 1.
Table 2: Examples of safety critical tasks : Safety Critical Task Analysis
