The nature of mandatory, daily attendance at a prestart meeting does strange things to both leaders and attendee’s behaviour. It causes leaders to not feel obliged to create an environment which people want to be at as attendance is compulsory, and attendees don’t engage because they are forced to be there. A great way to start the day for all!
Why would we let our teams stand around for 15 minutes taking in little information (having a low ability to recall it also) and achieving no progress? On a site running a 13 day fortnight that’s 6.5 hours of unproductive time per person per month!
What we need is a shift in thinking, one to valuing the forum and fearing we aren’t adding value rather than one of mandatory compliance. Prestarts do not need to be stock standard information transferring sessions but an opportunity for leaders to enroll and engage the team to start the day off in the best possible mindset with all the required information.
Below is a shout out to improve the prestart meeting from an individual leader’s perspective, but can be used by senior leaders / support staff to coach leaders into being better presenters and getting those crucial messages across
Why improve?
- Identify and understand the benefits of a pre start completed well by individuals who conduct them
- Understand that you as a leader are constantly judged by the attendees
- Competence is respected, confidence promotes unity, vision inspires
- Starting the day with direction and focus
- For yourself and your team, this creates a resilient and positive work environment.
- Identify, communicate and put plans in place for achieving objectives and minimizing risk
- Actions with a strong planned outcome drive performance
- Listening cost is high (labour cost of everyone listening), are you generating value or reducing it?
- Understand that you as a leader are constantly judged by the attendees
The next post two posts will outline how and what we can do to improve prestarts
Reframe my Safety Brain 