One of the fundamentals of Ted’s coaching style is to have fun. Can you have fun while promoting safety? Afterall, safety is serious business. The answer is, of course you can! I’m curious, what are some things YOU do to make safety fun? Please share them!
Here are some ideas to get you thinking:
Have employees make a music video about a safety concept. Use it at your safety meetings. Give prizes for the best one(s).
Up the game on safety meetings. Let your team members run the meetings with skits, songs and demonstrations. The best safety meeting I ever attended was employee led. A team created a skit demonstrating how clothing becomes a hazard. Employees had to shout out what wasn’t safe. The amount of whooping, hollering, and laughing was amazing!
Create a Do Jo and have employees interact with mock-ups of their work area. They can see, touch and feel the hazards in a safe environment.
Use learning maps. Take a picture of a work area and make a placemat. Use cards to ask questions and get employees to identify risks and mitigations. Let them lead the discussions.
Turn lessons learned and case studies into a competition by asking HOW can the incident happen here. People love a challenge and asking HOW this can happen here unleashes employee creativity.
Plan for fun in safety committee meetings.
Let your team try to destroy PPE. Put a hammer a steel toed shoe. Try and cut a cut-resistant glove. You get the idea.
Have silly awards. Build symbols and traditions. Just like the Diamond Dogs howl when they meet and are dismissed. I used to give a rubber chicken to a team member for silly (never unsafe) things that they did.
Then there are the old standbys. Safety bingo, quizzes, lottery tickets.
Try a few. You may just get your team howling like Ted’s Diamond Dogs.
If you are interested in developing your safety team, consider running the Safety Professional’s Academy. Contact me to have a conversation.
If you have safety professionals who require coaching, please give me a call!
