Farm safety conversations are a deliberate and proactive way to periodically “check-in” on safety throughout the day.
Conversations should be encouraged between everyone on the farm – the owner, family workers, employees, contractors or visitors.
You can try working conversations about safety into regular communication. This could be while:
- planning the day
- checking in throughout the day
- morning tea or lunch
- when something goes wrong
- when something’s going well
- at the end of the day
Use the opportunity to steer the conversation proactively and deliberately towards health, safety and/or wellbeing. Ask an “open” question that can’t be answered with just a yes or no.
Here are 21 questions / conversation starters to get you underway:
What’s the plan for today?
What jobs do we have to do this week?
What’s different from last week?
Who is on the farm this week? Do we have contractors? What do we need to do to look after them?
What kind of dangers do we need to consider with this work?
How would you do this?
What do we need to do to keep ourselves safe?
Do we need to do this right now, or at all?
What should we do if conditions change? What is our plan B?
Are we up for this work today? How do we feel?
Are we confident we know how to do this right?
Do we know how to do this task well? Or is there another way to do this?
Have we got the right tools and equipment for the job?
Have we allowed enough time to do this properly?
Why did our day go well?
What is working well?
This blog post was written by Henry Samson, of Samson Safety, a qualified health and safety professional and partner of SaferMe. The original post can be found here: https://samsonsafety.nz/having-good-farm-safety-conversations/
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