What are Safety Briefings?
Indeed, dialogue is the key component in order to maintain a safe environment for managers, workers and site visitors. Depending on the workplace, then they can be exposed to several risks such as chemicals and hazardous equipment. It is an obvious fact that information about work-related hazards and risks are required for people to stay safe. This also include suitable means for preventing injury and illness such as PPE amongst other controls. In this regard, safety briefings can be a quite handy way to keep health and safety as a primary concern in the workers minds by making them mindful about existing risks and dangers. Likewise, well-organised safety meetings are useful for distributing essential safety information to employees and offer them an opportunity to share their queries.
Significance of Safety Briefings
In order to ensure that employees are aware of the occupational health and safety risks related to their work, a variety of industries use safety meetings for this purpose. Safety briefings should be organised with a professional approach and with a great effort to ensure that employees consider them as a crucial component of their jobs. When safety briefings are conducted daily by supervisors for all workers, it supports in implementing an effective health and safety culture.
There is no doubt that the workforce can be soothed by routines without safety meetings which can gradually decline their vigilance and responsiveness to safety issues as their given tasks become a part of their daily routines. Therefore, with the help of safety briefings the workers can benefit from the health and safety reminders as they are informed by what means they can stay safe and the way safety methods are required for them.
In addition to that, another key role played by the safety briefing is avoiding accidents in the workplace, because due to lack of awareness or not repeatedly reminded about the importance of safety. Certainly, avoiding work-site accidents can be beneficial for the organisations and workers in financial aspects as well. Safety briefings are typically organised by compliance officers, managers, supervisors, trainers and health & safety officers, with the purpose of drawing the participants attention towards the hazards and risk associated with their jobs. They are professionals with special expertise within the area and choose the most relevant information to deliver based on a given project. Furthermore, risk evaluation is also a very significant element of safety briefings. In these meetings recent events impacting employee’s health and safety are reviewed so that this information can be utilised to update current safety plans and practices to eliminate repetition of incidents.
Despite the fact that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or a different regulatory agency require an employer to analyse work accidents and health issues, this insight can determine the most value add topics for safety meetings. In the same way these safety meetings can be shared on a company’s intranet, staff email, newsletters and on workplace notice boards amongst others.
Implementation of Counter Measures
Moreover, the implementation of counter measures is another prominent feature of safety briefing. A recognised hazard identification process is required by employers, which will feed into and determine the topics for the safety briefings.
It is important the person carrying out the safety meeting is confident and able to communicate effectively in groups. The person should focus on applicable issues and be able to take counter measures in practical terms to prevent future incidents. Another important factor for effective safety briefings is to make them interactive through questions or activities involving the participants.
Above all, an organisation’s emphasis on safety can bring about a more encouraging and progressive image of the organisation. This also contribute to preserving customer service standards that might be affected undesirably as a result of employee being absent.
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