• Establish regular safety committee meetings to keep people focused on the most important issues as well as hold them accountable for results.
• Set the tone that safety is a company value and preventing crashes is expected.

As a safety manager with so many responsibilities, it can be difficult to stay focused — to know what area of safety concern requires your immediate attention and long-term consideration. To address the issue of staying informed and disseminating important information, many safety professionals — across all industries — rely on a daily/weekly/monthly safety meeting with key operations, recruiting, and training personnel to keep on top of issues affecting the organization’s overall safety performance.

Also known as a weekly significant events meeting, this safety management meeting can help you:

• Keep up-to-date (in real time) on safety critical issues that affect the entire organization;
• Stay informed on safety- and operational-related incidents such as personal injuries, minor vehicle accidents, driver turnover events, customer service failures, cargo claims, etc.;
• Ensure necessary follow-up, corrective action, discipline, or management intervention occurs in a timely manner for all safety and operational concerns; and
• Communicate and reinforce your safety vision and values to every department on a weekly basis.

Tips for your weekly significant events meeting:

• Hold them at the end of the business day each Monday to discuss the previous week’s safety and operational results.
• Don’t allow interruptions. Even though your safety meetings should be brief, this is a serious weekly get-together. Before you start, make sure everyone has made arrangements with their staff to take messages and answer phones for the next 15-20 minutes.
• This is a reporting meeting, not a debate. If a discussion gets heated, continue it at the next meeting or after the current meeting on a one-to-one basis.
• Hold the meeting in a central location such as the dispatch/operations office, or via video conference, at the same time and location every week. Safety is a state of mind, and by conducting your meetings at the same time and place every week, eventually they will become routine and an expected part of the involved personnel’s work-week.
• Encourage team members to review near misses — situations when they came close to having an accident — with the group. Try to get the team to learn from these experiences.
• Use a standard report format for safety committee members to provide updates on their respective responsibilities. This is a critically important part of conducting weekly safety meetings. Your job is not done until you document the meeting. This record could be critical in the future. But remember, the important thing is the message you send to your people, not what form you use.
• After each meeting, encourage discussion among team members about the significant events of the past week. Review recent vehicle accidents and onthe- job injuries. Ask participants to forward any suggestions about how the loss event could have been prevented or the violation corrected.

Safety meetings with the office personnel and drivers should convey a consistent message that safety is a value not a moment to moment priority. The message should be similar to the following:

“We will take all loss events seriously — regardless of type or severity. As an organization, we will evaluate, analyze, and learn from every loss event. In doing so, our goal is to prevent accidents and any reoccurrence by proactively managing our risk.”

Safety committee functions:

General functions of a safety committee can include:

1. Identifying/investigating and reducing or eliminating potential work environment hazards;
2. Reducing accident and injury frequency and severity rates;
3. Ensuring that the facility and shop is in compliance with OSHA standards;
4. Creating and maintaining active participation and awareness in safety;
5. Enforcing safety rules;
6. Measuring safety performance;
7. Increasing employee safety awareness and general morale;
8. Creating and administering incentive programs to promote safety;
9. Issuing periodic reports, bulletins, posters, and table tents to report on safety accomplishments;
10. Evaluating employee attitudes toward safety and safety programs;
11. Developing, administering, and monitoring the safety program;
12. Facilitating communication and cooperation between management and employees which, includes drivers, on safety and health;
13. Creating new safety policies and programs; and
14. Demonstrating results to management and employees.

The safety committee can be one of the most important tools to help the safety professional influence and drive positive change