Why Safety Moments Benefit Your Workplace Safety Program

Safety moments are the most casual component of your safety presentation schedule. In fact, they’re not actually presentations at all.

And while PowerPoint slides might help you convince upper management, the laid-back nature of safety moments makes them perfect for your workforce.

Here’s why safety moments are a short, sweet, and effective way to communicate important safety topics to your team.

What Are Safety Moments?

Safety moments aren’t quite like safety talks and they’re certainly not the same as presentations. If presentations are at the far end of the scale, complex and stereotypically dull, and casual safety talks are in the middle, then safety moments are the most casual of the three.

A safety moment is a brief safety talk at the beginning of a meeting or shift. It’s exactly what the name implies – a moment to step aside and have a quick chat about safety.

In this case, less is more. Safety moments should be no more than five or six minutes, though they can be as short as two minutes. They can cover almost any topic, from slips, trips and falls to a recent workplace accident to the importance of staying safe at work and at home.

Why Use Safety Moments?

Safety moments only allow you a brief window to bring up a safety topic, and that’s actually a point in their favor.

Because safety moments are so short and casual, they’re the perfect avenue to bring up a safety topic in a non-threatening way. You can talk about a major topic, like violence in the workplace, but you can do it in a way that feels like a conversation.

This makes it easier for workers to connect to the safety topic at hand since safety moments feel more like conversations between safety officers and workers.

Making Safety Moments More Personal

Safety moments thrive when they are personal – and in many ways, so does safety as a whole.

You can spend all day talking about statistics and risks and remind workers to use PPE, but at the end of the day, workers don’t relate to statistics. Those are just numbers and workers can’t connect them to their lived experiences.

What they can connect to is the idea of going home safe to their families. Safety moments lend themselves to safety conversations of a more personal nature, reminding workers why safety matters.

Lean into the casual nature of safety moments by making them conversations between people. Tell personal safety stories about family, friends, or even your own experiences. Link daily risk exposure to your own safety behavior and how that behavior reflects back on life at home.

Make safety moments about people, not hard facts.

A New Way to Think About Safety

While safety moments are laid back and personal, don’t be afraid to use them for big safety topics. After all, if you want your workers to think about safety issues that matter, there’s no better place to start than a casual, approachable conversation.

If you need some ideas to incorporate into your safety moments, make sure to check out our blog for more great tips.