Effective consultation encourages greater awareness of issues and can lead to improved safety outcomes. Talking with the people who work in your business enables information sharing before making any decisions that may impact on them. The people who work in your business are often the best people to understand the risks in the workplace.
Seeking their input when making decisions shows them that you take their health and safety seriously. The benefit to your business is that you address potential problems before they escalate.
To assist businesses to deliver safety talks, we have developed a series of short presentations on work health and safety topics. These Toolbox Safety Talks cover:
- benefits of a healthy workplace
- forklift safety
- hazard identification and risk assessment
- hazardous manual tasks
- inappropriate workplace behaviour
- infection control
- new and young worker safety
- slips, trips and falls
- work health and safety responsibilities
- working hours
- workplace drug and alcohol strategies.
Employer responsibilities
Before holding a Toolbox Safety Talk advertise the upcoming topic to your workers using our presenter poster template. This will get people thinking about how the safety topic is managed at the business.
During the presentation, read out the scenarios and promote discussion by asking the questions in each presentation. In addition, outline any policies and/or procedures that are relevant to the topic that exist in the business. See presenter instructions.
Record who attended the presentation and any suggestions/areas for improvement. Follow up on any actions at the next Toolbox Safety Talk as well as established safety meeting such as a Safety Committee.
Try to have a variety of presenters from your workplace or you may like to invite one of our WHS Advisors to give a guest presentation. Also search the web and/or your industry group for additional topics specific to your industry.
Worker responsibilities
Actively consider and participate in the Toolbox Safety Talk topic by discussing what works in the current processes relevant to the topic and any areas for improvement.