Monthly Employee Communications (Online Format)

The practice I would like to share today is dedicated to monthly online meetings with employees who have computer access. In our company, we call them "EHS-update".

The essence of this practice is that during this meeting, we share the results of our work for the month, as well as planned HSE activities. However, to make these meetings more energetic and engaging, we have incorporated some interesting tools that I would like to share with you, along with an overall overview of the event's structure.

The meetings are organized every month, during the first week following the reporting period. They take about 40 minutes. The invited participants include all employees with computer access. The presentation is led by the Head of the Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) department, involving participants from other departments as needed.

The general structure of the presentation is as follows:

1. 5-minute safety talk. This meeting ALWAYS starts with a 5-minute safety talk. The topics vary greatly and depend on the time of year the meeting is held. For example, in summer and autumn, these might be topics related to safety when working at a summer cottage, home canning, working with manual garden tools, etc. There are many topics; we periodically repeat some, but mostly we try to come up with something new and interesting. Sometimes colleagues suggest a topic for the 5-minute talk themselves; in this case, we ask them to present it independently while helping them prepare the material.
2. HSE statistics. Here we present information regarding the number of incidents that occurred within the company and within the state corporation, as well as other KPIs (key performance indicators).

In our case, the key HSE indicators are:

– number of open safety tags;

– number of employees opening these tags;

– results of behavioral audits (loss trees and audit schedule compliance compared to the plan);

– results of the 3-stage HSE control.

Environmental KPIs:

– water consumption,

– wastewater discharge,

– CO2 emissions,

– waste sent for recycling and disposal,

– energy consumption,

– environmental non-conformities identified during the period.

3. Information on incidents that occurred within the company and the state corporation. We provide a more detailed account of the incident circumstances, including photographic materials.
4. Completed HSE activities: this concerns not only the work performed by our department but also by employees from other departments who were involved in the work. We highlight only key and significant activities that will be of interest to the audience.
5. Process changes. If we introduce innovations, for example: launching a training process or internal inspections, we always report on the key changes, who will be affected, and how it might impact the processes.
6. Contractor statistics. We inform about the number of contracting organizations working on-site and any violations, if there were any.
7. Interesting activities during the period. These could be past volunteer campaigns, results of participation in HSE competitions, results of corporate sports events, improvements in employee working conditions, etc.
8. Work in progress. To keep employees informed about current and upcoming work, we present the activities planned for the future period. Typically, this covers a maximum of 2-3 months.
9. "Thank you, colleague". In this section, our department expresses gratitude to colleagues for any assistance they have provided. Employees are always pleased to hear words of appreciation; it is not for nothing they say, "Praise in public."
10. "I'm not a coward, but I'm cautious and warning everyone" segment. A new segment we launched this year. We invited colleagues to share their safety experiences in everyday life: for example, when risky situations occurred, how they coped, and what they did. We believe that personal examples are the most vivid because they are lived by people and can "touch" those who care.

We also periodically invite speakers from the HR department or other divisions who want to share interesting personnel-related information to add variety to the presentation (for example, employee awards, coordinators for healthy lifestyle initiatives, etc.).

These online meetings have shown high staff attendance over a long period, which indicates employee interest, helps engage them in safety issues, and increases their awareness. It is important to plan these meetings in advance. We block out time in the calendar for at least 1 year, and sometimes more. The presentation is also duplicated as a printed copy on information boards in the production departments.