If you ask anyone the question "Where does occupational safety start?", you will surely hear: "With a briefing." After all, it is with the induction briefing that employment begins in any organization.
Yes, legislation mandates that briefings be conducted for employees. However, the psychological aspect of conducting these briefings plays a very important role.
A situation is very common where employees undergo a briefing but learn almost nothing new from it. This is why a briefing is often perceived as a mere formality, a ritual without which one cannot start work or take office.
One of the reasons for this situation is that HSE specialists are often in a hurry and hold the opinion that they must conduct at least something for the employee. The logic is simple: no briefing means a serious investigation in the event of an accident.
And it is much easier to absolve oneself of blame by referring to the fact that the employee's signature is there, so it is their own fault.
In reality, conducting a briefing is necessary for the employee so that they understand how their actions can affect what is happening around them and can assess the risks in their work in a timely manner.
And for this, it is very important to make the briefing high-quality and interesting.
One way to form a high-quality briefing is through its content. A briefing written strictly according to regulatory documents, containing a huge number of technical terms and detailed descriptions of processes, causes only one desire in the employee — to sleep.
A briefing does not have the task of teaching the requirements of the profession. The employee already understands how to perform the work.
What we need is for the employee to perform their work safely.
Therefore, when forming a briefing, it is necessary to clearly talk about the cause-and-effect relationship between the employee's actions (or inaction) and what can happen and how.
The second and no less important factor is how the specialist conducts the briefing. Having well-delivered, professional speech makes the task of conveying information much easier.
If the HSE specialist themselves has a poor command of the information, reads from a piece of paper, is constantly distracted, and skips the briefing text in entire chunks, then the employee entering the work activity will get the impression that "nobody gives a damn about HSE here"... as sad as it may sound.
But if the HSE specialist is personally interested in fulfilling their task, they can easily convince even a hardened skeptic in HSE matters.
However, no matter how interesting the briefing is, time passes and knowledge weakens slightly. This is why legislation provides for periodic briefings.
According to global injury statistics, there are 2 categories of workers for whom periodic briefings are very important.
The first category is older workers or those who have been working in the company for a long time. Their unspoken rule is: "I've done this a hundred times and nothing happened." In the injury history of such workers, the greatest danger lies in habituation to the hazard factor present in the workplace.
The second category is young workers. A young employee does not yet fully know the equipment and processes.
In general, conducting periodic briefings aims to "shake up" a person, to remind them once again that they work in a hazardous production facility and an accident can happen to them at any moment if they are not careful. The main thing is to approach this issue responsibly and with an understanding of the peculiarities of information perception by employees.