Posted By David Bannister Hi Sharon, try making the meetings interesting. This is not a flippant answer. I have attended dreadfuly boring meetings and found reasons not to go the the next ones. I don't think I have actually fallen asleep in one but have genuinely heard snores from others. Why are the existing members on the committee? Did they want to be chosen? Besides the routine stuff (previous minutes, apologies,accident stats) try to introduce new ideas, new personnel if the old ones are jaded and an element of fun and participation by all. Action points can be allocated to specific personnel and (most importantly) accepted by them, with a real comitment to get them sorted. Make the correct people acountable for completion. Point the committee towards proactive work i.e looking to achieve improvements in H&S, rather than a reactive role. Is the chair the right person for the role? Why not rotate the chair? Hope this helps.

Posted By garyh Empower the commitee. Pay people who attend (eg shift workers on days off). Invite interesting guest speakers eg from rival company, Union, whatever. Make sure that things get done, and that people know this via feedback. If it's a talking shop where people whinge about things that never get resolved then forget it. Provide coffee and bickies........ The last one is quite effective, in my opinion!

Posted By TBC Beat me to it David with some great ideas.

Posted By Pete Longworth Amandac beat me to it.

Posted By Sharon Bacon butties and sausage butties to start with then I will keep a score of individual attendance over a 12 month rolling average and display it on the minutes. See it this changes anything....... Thanks all!

Posted By Pete48 Personally I would find the bacon butty and biscuit approach rather patronising. If the style of the company is to provide such things for any meeting then maybe OK but if not then I wouldn't do it. Making meetings more interesting is also not that easy. Have you never been to a broing meeting? If you can think of the last one and ask yourself why it was boring, you may identify whether your meetings are boring or not and how you could improve them. A lack of regular attendance usually reflects a sense that safety is not important in the workplace and/or that the safety committee has no respect from the management of the company. You could try asking each of those that do not attend why they do not attend and what changes would make a difference for them? The answers may be very difficult to hear but if you want positive contributions to your safety programmes you need to listen and act. The smell and taste of the bacon butty is only a short term fix and make sure you dont have any vegetarians or people who don't like bacon:):)

Posted By w.j. jones Sharon How often do you hold meetings?..personally I would look at the frequency and content of the meetings and look at ways of either reducing the content or upping the frquency, what you will then find is more frequent but shorter, more relveant meetings...not discounting some of the earlier ideas. I think we have to recognise sometimes that anyone who is not a H&S professinal will struggle with what they don't fully understand the liabilities of, and if you can keep the information precise and to the point, with defined accountability, it often helps to gain buy in from people who actually see actions happening quickly. Hope this helps W.Jones

Posted By lisa mccaulder Hi Sharon I'm with Garyh on this one. The only thing I would add is to consider who the chairperson is. A bad chairperson can allow a safety committee to become a whinging shop with no positive feel to it and no sense that anything is being achieved. You need a strong chairperson who sticks to the agenda and involves the members in interesting stuff like root cause analysis and identifying latent failures, active monitoring and sampling schemes and even running a safety award competitions and raising awareness. without that you find that one or two dominant personalities take over the committee and it ends up being no fun for anyone else... Lisa..