To keep workers safe and healthy, ongoing education about workplace well-being is a must, as is addressing common risks, so a hand safety toolbox talk should be on regular rotation. No time to create one? We’ve got a hand safety toolbox talk PDF written, designed, and ready for you. All you need to do is implement it.
Toolbox Talks: Why They’re Useful
It’s important to keep workers in a safety mindset because it’s easy to get distracted by everything that’s going on in a workplace: distractions are actually a major contributor to accidents. To keep people focused on safety first, it’s good to have frequent but short, casual safety refreshers. That’s where your toolbox talk comes into play.
While a manager or other person in a leadership position plans and organizes these wellness boosters, it’s important to allow and encourage an open exchange. Floor staff will notice what management might miss or be uninformed about: it takes teamwork to keep staff safe. Keep these meetings to small groups to facilitate including everyone and so that your talks don’t become unwieldy.
By getting everyone involved in safety regularly, you’ll strengthen your safety culture and instill in your workforce that safety is always the top priority.
The Importance of Hand Safety
Healthy hands and good dexterity are necessary for just about every job and certainly necessary to get through daily life comfortably. Many common workplace injuries, like lacerations and punctures, happen to the hands and fingers. If workers can’t return to work because they’ve suffered work-related hand injuries, that’s costly paid time off, not to mention the pain and difficulties experienced by the affected worker. Additionally, any injury that requires time off is recordable. This contributes to your total recordable incident rate, which comes with its own set of consequences.
The neuromuscular makeup of the hand is intricate and it doesn’t take much to seriously disrupt the multitude of fine parts that must work in harmony for the hand to function well. This complexity makes hands difficult to fix and to heal. Keeping hands safe is very important.
The great news is that hand injuries are almost always preventable. Causes of the most common hand injuries are no mystery, so hand safety is a matter of keeping workers mindful at all times. That’s where your hand safety toolbox talks are going to shine.
Why Use the Slice Hand Safety Toolbox Talk
The hand injury safety toolbox talk we created covers the spectrum of hand hazards to watch out for and includes short bulleted suggestions of how to avoid them. We highlight the following hazards:
- Lacerations and punctures
- Pinches and crushes
- Muscle strain and overuse
- Hazardous surfaces and substances
- Hand smashes or abrasions when carrying objects
- Hand impact from a trip and fall
- Reaching into machinery or other hazardous areas
The bottom area of our hand protection safety talk features concise Key Takeaways. We keep everything short, useful, and to the point. And funny. Safety is serious business, we know, but humor helps lighten the mood, and, we hope our poor battered Mr. Hand keeps staff engaged in the conversation.
How to Use This Guide
We suggest using the PDF as a handout, poster, or sharing it via text or email. You can cover the entire hand protection toolbox talk in one go, or use each section as a module in a series to keep meetings short and highly focused. Better to communicate one idea well than several ideas poorly. And it’s not just enough to hand out or display the information; to make it effective, you need to bring it to life. You need to make it useful, relatable, and even a little bit fun.
Making your focus small also allows you to elaborate on each section or cover it thoroughly. For instance, the first section on the PDF, about punctures and lacerations, suggests maintaining all cutting tools and making sure your blades are in good working order. So, as part of your toolbox talk, have everyone check their tools. Boom, done!
Another item that’s covered in that section is gloves: make sure they fit and move well. Have each worker get their gloves and check that they are ready to do the job. By going through these tasks as part of your talk, you’ll also be able to check them off your safety checklist.
Slice Safety Education Extras
Slice® provides other learning tools you may want to include as part of your safety talks and training. In this blog, we focus a lot on hand safety and preventing lacerations, and we discuss how our tools keep you safer. We also cover a wide range of other subjects. Slice articles cover a variety of general laceration prevention topics, as well as specific Slice information.
Everyone loves a short video, and we’ve got a lot. See how to use Slice tools to safely cut any number of materials. For example, our CEO shows you here the correct technique for cutting plastic banding on pallet inners:
{{ script_embed('wistia', 'ed5n9elba0', ', ', 'inline,responsive', 'wistia') }}
Safety Is Our Lane
Slice has been focusing on safety for a decade. Safety is the first consideration in all our tool designs and the reason that we create innovative products in the first place: our efforts make people safer. Our many documented success stories attest to that, as does regular feedback from individual Slice users. It’s why more than half of the Fortune 1000 companies use Slice tools.
We don’t stop at tools. We are committed to safety education as well, through our written materials and videos and now our first toolbox talk. We worked hard to provide a useful takeaway tool and we’d love to hear from you how it works. Please share how you use this hand safety toolbox talk.
