Effective Toolbox Meetings Training Outline

Keep It Brief

These informal talks don’t need to talk all day, and safety should never equate hours spent in toolbox meetings. The ideal toolbox talk should only last ten to fifteen minutes, although it can go up to around twenty to twenty five minutes. The point in keeping it short is so that the people in the meeting don’t have information overloads and forget something critical because of everything else they had to remember.

Talk to the Boss

It is very important to make sure there is a supervisor or an administrator heading a toolbox meeting. This ensures that the event is properly documented or recorded, and so the administration knows the plan too. Because of this, we can avoid disasters, like a safety concern that was bypassed because the administration knew, but the staff didn’t. Ideally, these toolbox meetings should be held and headed by a supervisor on a regular basis, and this gives the opportunity for workers to speak out about their safety concerns, which, once recorded by the supervisor, will make it back to higher management for implementation and consideration.

Stay Focused

It is crucial to keep your toolbox meeting focused on whatever safety issue you meant to discuss. If the toolbox meeting is unfocused, what happens first is information overload; because they have to consider all these new possibilities brought up by the shift in topic, they might forget everything you were just discussing, important information that could save the company. Afterwards, because they’re busy considering all these convoluted possibilities, it extends the discussion time, wasting more minutes than you should be on what should have been a simple office response to active shooters. Because of the extended time, even people who were beating the information overload can start to get unfocused and lose interest in what you were saying because they’re starting to think about where they’d rather be. What you can do to avoid this is promise that you’ll discuss those extra possibilities another time, but to keep to the topic next time so we don’t stay longer than we have to. This makes sure that whoever was getting the conversation unfocused feels validated that you appreciate his or her feedback, but that he shouldn’t waste everyone’s time on something he could have suggested as the target for the next meeting. The point is to make sure that your toolbox meeting accomplishes a safety objective in as short a time as possible, while making the best quality response your team can muster.