S13Ep4: SafeChat Transforming Routines with Visual Cues

Unlock the secrets to maintaining safety in a world with dwindling attention spans. Discover how SafeChat can seamlessly integrate into your safety briefings, whether at work, home or on the road, to foster an environment where safety is prioritized naturally.

Host: Danny Smith

https://safestart.com/news/the-ultimate-guide-to-safety-posters/

Transcript

Danny Smith: 0:08

Welcome back to Safe Talk with Safe Start. I'm Danny Smith. A recent study by Microsoft found that the average human attention span has dropped to only eight seconds. Eight, not 80. Eight, that's just not a lot of time to capture someone's attention, to prevent an accident or perhaps a costly mistake, and that's why our product development team has recently developed SafeChat.

Danny Smith: 0:31

Now, not to do too deep of a dive into the neuroscience of the SafeStart skills, but visual cues play an important role in things like habit formation. If a colorful poster catches your eye well, and you pause to read that, then that can in turn prompt your conscious mind to recognize, or, to use our terminology, self-trigger when a state is elevated. And visual cues are also noticed by our subconscious mind, which in turn can cause one of our safety-related habits to kick in when needed. That's where SafeChat comes in. SafeChat is a series of posters that will serve as a visual prompt to remind each of us of the SafeStart concept and skills that you've been working on since the implementation of the process and, from a business perspective, it's a great way to reinforce these techniques to help with long-term sustainability. The new SafeChat posters are designed as a simple way to generate discussions around a specific SafeStart concept, each month with a different focus each week. You can include a SafeChat during pre-shift safety briefings once a week, just to put safety back at the forefront of everyone's mind. Safehats are meant to be two to five minutes long and they can be done in any order, so long as they cycle between state error and critical error reduction techniques. Now, these are not meant to replace safety training or safe tart training. These just simply reinforce the core safe start concepts and promote the application of those safety techniques. So here's how SafeChat works.

Danny Smith: 2:07

There are three categories of posters work which are colored blue, home which are green and then orange for on the road. Each category has four topics and the idea is to feature one poster a month. Three times four equals 12, within your facility. Again, the posters are a great visual reminder just to reinforce the discussions that you're having. Gang, don't just hang the posters. Okay, have the conversations. That's where the real learning opportunities reside. Okay, I'll get off my soapbox here, but have the conversations, please. Okay, each category of posters has four different topics. There will be a state, an error and a critical error reduction technique. That's mentioned with us as well. There's no specific order. Whichever topic will resonate with your folks each month can be chosen. It's your call. However, we strongly recommend alternating between categories or colors when choosing a topic. That will help with complacency when changing the topic each month. When you use the same color back to back, people may walk by the poster thinking that they've already seen it, and we've all seen cases where well, the posters just become wallpaper, if you will.

Danny Smith: 3:21

The familiar topics, combined with the images and text, are meant to spark spontaneous conversations within your facility, but we've also created a monthly topic sheet for structuring a consistent SafeChat plan. Safechats are intended to be a sustainability tool for year two of your SafeStart Now journey, but you can actually use them earlier than that, as long as your folks have completed all four units of SafeStart Now or all of the units of SafeStart Classic. It's just another sustainability tool. We're also looking at additional kits that are going to be created in the future just to continue the idea of SafeChat and give you more topics to discuss with your folks. As an added bonus, there's also a SafeChat guided monthly topic sheet available for use from our client portal. It provides suggestions for those weekly discussions for each poster along with how to use the searc for that topic.

Danny Smith: 4:16

If you want more information about the pricing of the SafeChat poster kit, be sure to talk with your client manager. I think you'll love how effective these posters are and you'll love the time saving of not having to create them yourselves. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. I'm also going to place a note here in the show notes that has some of the well-thought-out strategies from our team on the general use of posters which I think you'll find useful as well. Be sure to check that out For Safe Talk with Safe Start. I'm Danny Smith. Have a great day.