With any skilled job there is always the risk of accidents happening and, even if you use your knowledge and common sense, you cannot always stop the inevitable from happening.
You can however have Toolbox Talks with your employees. You may ask yourself, what are these?
These talks are for reminding your employees how important it is to be safe while carrying out their daily duties at work. To update them on any changes to the health and safety rules or anything that can could put their life in danger. These talks has proven to be extremely effective and will certainly help to prevent accidents from happening in the future.
Hart Safety know this and recognise that Toolbox Talks are an important part of the arrangements so will encourage all clients to have these talks with their employees on a regular basis. Your aim will then be to maintain awareness of health and safety issues on projects and to reinforce the safety rules. We feel that it should be up to a supervisor to carry out these Toolbox Talks and to give as much information as possible where needed.
We recommend that it may be a good idea to have these talks before your employees start their shift. It will be fresh in their minds and will not be easily forgotten. It can be a 3 to 5 minute discussion about something that is safety related, but needs to be to the point. It is really important to gather up your men while they are on the premises and maybe find an area which is as free from disruption as possible. They will need your full attention. Each person can benefit from receiving one Toolbox Talks per week and it is best for individual supervisors to get into a pattern of carrying out their session at the same time each week.
This way you and your employees can be prepared for these talks. This is not a training exercise.
Why do you need these Toolbox Talks?
These talks are very important. They can save your life. It does not matter how many times you hear the health and safety rules, there are always going to be some people that are not familiar with them. Having these talks once a week will not only keep the information fresh in your mind but will make you aware of any bad conditions that you may need to know about. The jobs that you are doing may change from time to time, so there may be some important rules that you do not know about or that may have changed because you are using new machinery. Please listen to what you are being told when having these talks because we cannot stress enough how important they are.
It is for this purpose that Hart Safety have compiled the Toolbox Talks Manual which we provide to our Clients to assist with delivering this service.