5 Tips for creating engaging tailgate talks

Tailgate talks are one of the easiest ways to engage your staff and promote a culture of safety. They are specifically designed to be a quick review of safety protocols and techniques your staff have already been trained on as a reminder to keep safety in the forefront of their minds.  

Tailgate talks create the opportunity to connect with your entire staff once a week and enable you to not only touch on safety topics, but also to talk about changes in company policies, recognize individual or crew-based achievements, and acknowledge birthdays or other important events. 

Here are 5 tips for creating engaging tailgate talks: 

• Preplan your tailgate talks for the season so you don’t need to worry about what your next topic will be. Create a tailgate talks binder sorted by topics and dates relevant to the time of year (ie. In April, talk about blower safety ahead of spring clean-up) and decide in advance who will be speaking on each topic.
• Keep it short. Tailgate talks should be around 10 minutes long. It’s about frequency, not duration.
• Keep it consistent. Decide what day of the week you’ll have the tailgate talk and then stick to it.
• Keep it simple. Review a single safety topic, your company’s specific procedures for that topic, answer relevant staff questions and get on with your day.
• Use Greenius! They have a comprehensive list of customizable and printable tailgate talks that can be used all year round.

Taking 10-15 minutes once a week helps with company culture, staff engagement, and provides a window for crews to mingle with each other. 

“Within a month of changing the format for how we were doing the tailgate talks, we saw better staff engagement, more questions being asked, far more sociability between staff that didn't work together often and better performance in the first half of the day.” - Jordan Robertson