Alive and Well at the End of the Day, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 14SAFETY MEETINGS WORTH HAVING

No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

—Mark Twain

When was the last time you went to a really good safety meeting, the kind you and everyone else in the room found worth their time to attend? Or are your safety meetings more like this one?

7:45 a.m. Friday morning: Monthly Department Safety Meeting

Fifteen minutes into the department’s safety meeting, it’s the manager’s turn to present the “safety topic of the month”—talking points coming straight from HQ. The only consolation: the audience has already mentally deserted the room, the predictable effect of opening the meeting with the dreaded review of the safety statistics—known by all as “Death by PowerPoint.”

Not that the leader could blame anyone: she hadn’t been paying much attention, either. “Why do we go through with this charade,” she asks herself, “month after month, year after year? There’s not a person in the room who wouldn’t rather be out on the job, doing something productive. Including me.” As she thumbs through the material about to be presented, “And what were they thinking when they told us we had to present this in a safety meeting? It’s a complete waste of time.”

Twenty minutes later, the attendance sheet was passed around. All participants signed, indicating they were present in the meeting.

Safety meetings have a noble purpose: helping followers do their jobs safely. But too often, these weekly, monthly, or quarterly safety gatherings ...