If you’re about to hold a toolbox talk and you haven’t carefully considered the tasks your team are about to perform and the risks they may face then you’re not doing your job properly
Generic safety talks are fine up to a point but we know that every job is different and the risks and precautions will likely be subtly different to the generic examples.
Nobody wants to stand around on a cold site for 10 minutes listening to a broad brush explanation of electrocution risk and how to avoid it – but if you have broken down the job into stages and assessed the risks for each job stage along with mitigations you will probably find that your team are a lot more engaged – suddenly they are getting real job-specific information on how to stay safe today.
You ‘re able to to describe the hazards associated with each job stage along with the measures to be taken to mitigate the risks and your team are confident that they can proceed safely. It also sends a clear message that you are really prepared to put safety first, so you’ve got a team who are going to be focussed on the tasks in hand, not distracted or nervous because of unaddressed fears about the risks involved.
There’s no reason why this has to be difficult either – you should already be performing task based risk assessment, and the output from this assessment should be usable as the basis for the talk.