Who doesn’t like a little safety conversation with their first cup of coffee in the morning when you come to work?

It can certainly be much less controversial than talking politics!

Safety can involve a ton of information, and it would be unrealistic to expect your workers to retain all of what is important from a single safety training session or overall workshop or seminar. Very few of us have the kind of photographic memory to be able to retain information, so it is always necessary to have re-training sessions or occasional reminder meetings to reinforce some key safety concepts that will keep your workers safe.

[Image courtesy of The Natural Step Canada from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of The Natural Step Canada from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]

One prominent educational tool in this vein has been what is called a “toolbox talk,” featured on a growing number of construction work sites. Also called “tailgate talks” or “water cooler chats,” these are short conversations (not to be confused with lectures) in which a team supervisor or manager meets with a few of the workers to discuss a safety topic that is at front of mind for the foremen at the site. An article regarding toolbox talks was presented in the January 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine, and I wrote last week about the part of the article that discussed effective ways to present these discussions to the workforce so that more of the concepts being taught are retained.

It has to do with engagement and empowerment of workers.

While toolbox talks have become more prevalent in recent years, there is little empirical research to show whether these discussions are actually helping on worksites. Which could just mean that these talks are effective in that there isn’t an increase in risk or an increase in incident or injury frequency. And that can be good – if you are in an industry, such as construction, where incident rates are generally high and have been trending up, the first thing to do is flatten the curve before it turns downward.

The authors of this article about toolbox talks spent some time discussing a couple of projects in which these talks would be used to help convey key concepts in safety. One featured fall prevention on a residential construction site, and the other dealt with ergonomics and the safest ways to do tasks on site and instruction about the use of ergo-friendly tools.

In the first case, toolbox talk topics were introduced to several construction foremen, and they were given the charge to present these fall-prevention topics to their workers at various residential construction sites in and around the St. Louis, Missouri, area. The other project involved toolbox talks with carpet installers, carpenters and sheet-metal workers and weekly topics included proper body positioning to avoid awkward stresses on the body, ergonomic tools to be used on the job and how to spot a person in an awkward position – all of which used photographs of a worksite as illustrations in the talks led by the site’s safety coordinator and given directly to workers and foremen.

At the conclusion of each project, researchers gathered information from surveys and interviews of those giving the toolbox talks, those who participated as well as other stakeholders such as supervisors, executives and others who had knowledge of the conversations.

I won’t go into the details here (I would encourage you to go online and find the article), but it is reasonable to say that while the sample size of respondents was small, the results were encouraging that toolbox talks could indeed be used as an effective tool to bring home several key safety concepts – especially those that are preventive and proactive in nature.