Safety meetings are not supposed to be boring. People, more specifically presenters, make them that way.
Talks from the TED conferences are engaging. If you are not familiar with TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), they are a global set of conferences that bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes or less.
Eighteen minutes or less.
Some of the world’s greatest thinkers will change the world with their ideas in under 18 minutes. So the question becomes, if world-class thinkers and thought leaders are only given eighteen minutes to make their point, have the learning stick and ultimately change the world, why are mediocre safety presenters given 60-90 minutes to make a point or two about safety?
Padding, Fillers And Fluff
When amateur presenters are given a 90-minute time-slot to fill, they will pad their presentations to fill time. They will over-prepare adding cutesy videos, downloaded gruesome Internet photos of severed limbs, stats, charts and graphs which could be put into a PDF file and emailed only to those who were interested.
The yawn-fest unleashes the dullness of the safety presenter who stands at the front of the room advancing one boring slide after another. But it’s old-school thinking that dictates that presenters fill between 60 and 90 minutes on the schedule. But what if they can make their point in 15 minutes? When did the schedule of the meeting become more important than the content of the meeting?
It’s The Speakers That Are Boring - Not Safety
Safety meetings are not boring. Presenters are boring. Safety meeting presenters are renowned for their ability to take ten minutes of solid information and cram it into a 90-minute presentation.
The content though, when packaged properly, is never boring. After all, it keeps people safe, informs them, offers them opportunities to make better decisions, encourages them to choose to be accountable for their actions and makes it possible for them to go home to their families and play with their kids. How is that boring?
There may be safety training, but there’s no safety communication training in your company. Because of that fact, safety presenters take their cues from every bad safety presentation that has come before them.
The safety meeting is an opportunity to touch each team member personally - but is squandered as information-laden sessions. Safety meetings have become one-way broadcasts.
So Here's How You Fix It
1Content Over Schedule - If you've got an hour to fill and are simply looking for some sort of presenter to fill that time slot, you should ask yourself whether you're actually addressing the issue or merely giving the illusion of addressing the issue. Figure out what you need done or addressed, ask questions of your experts and select based on deliverables, not the amount of time in a schedule. If they need 30 minutes to address the problem, don't make them add filler and fluff to stretch it out to a 90-minute presentation just because you've scheduled ninety minutes. You're better off giving your people a one-hour break after a riveting 30-minute presentation to think about how they can apply what they learned instead of forcing them to sit there and be distracted by fluff and time-filling messages.
2Make It Mean Something - Are you challenging your people to internalize and talk about what they’ve just learned or are you dumping information and moving on to the next dump session? Give your meeting attendees five or so minutes to brainstorm among themselves how they might use the information practically. Address their solutions publicly for ten minutes and then give them a fifteen minute break for a job well done. Every hour, your safety meeting should feature a new subject, new learning and a new focus on using the information to make attendees better at staying safe.
3Protect The Minds Of Your Attendees - In the same way you would protect your employees from physical harm, you must protect them from conflicting messages. Every presenters’ presentation should be vetted before they get to the live stage. Have a small committee go through each presentation before it goes public. Edit, edit and edit some more. Get rid of the fluff and padding and get to the meaningful stuff. No one ever felt cheated that the safety meeting was too short. But if you keep them short, you will get better engagement.
Safety meetings are not supposed to be boring. People, more specifically presenters, make them that way. Put a stop to that. After all, safety meetings are meant to help make your organization better - not just better-informed. In order for your organization to get better, the presentations and the presenters must get better too.
An outside professional speaker can help put your next safety meeting or stand-down over the top. If you want to drive more motivation and buy-in to safety through your safety meetings, call to ask how I can help you do that.
