NU-SAF-104 — TOOLBOX TALK PROGRAM

Tier 2/3/4 — Procedure + Field Card + Attendance Form · Rev 0.1 DRAFT · Owner: Field Supervisor Parent: NU-SAF-100 (Safety & Health Program), §5 element 5. Topic source: HANDOFF TO STEVE (Softr)\07_Toolbox_Talks_52wk.csv — the 52-week schedule already exists, seasonally ordered, one row per week. This document incorporates it by reference. Do not rebuild it, do not maintain a second copy.

The register (NU-GOV-000) says why this document exists in two sentences: "Cheapest safety documentation that exists and Nova has none. Weekly signed sheets are the record every audit opens with."

THE GATE

Every crew hears one talk every week, standing at the truck, and every man present signs the sheet. The signed sheet (NU-SAF-104-F) is photographed the same morning — posted to the crew group before rollout and filed in the WO folder the same day — Standing Rule 4. No signed sheet, no talk happened.

The record for this gate is the NU-SAF-104-F attendance sheet in §7. A talk with no sheet is a conversation. After an incident, in a prequal audit, or across the table from an insurance underwriter, a conversation is worth nothing and a year of signed sheets is worth more than any other page Nova can produce for the money.

1. WHY THIS PAGE EXISTS

A toolbox talk is five to ten minutes of one safety topic, said out loud to the crew before work, with signatures proving it happened. That's the whole program. It is the cheapest safety documentation in existence — no class, no trainer, no fee — and Nova currently produces none of it.

Three people ask for these sheets, and all three ask early:

1. Prequal portals and GCs. Congruex Unify, ISNetworld, Avetta, and most GC safety packages ask for toolbox talk records by name. "We talk about safety all the time" scores zero.
2. OSHA. 29 CFR 1926.21(b)(2) requires the employer to instruct each employee in the recognition and avoidance of unsafe conditions. There is no standard that says the words "toolbox talk" — the weekly signed sheet is simply the cheapest proof that the instruction 1926.21(b)(2) requires is actually happening, week after week. After an incident, the talks and the training records are the first things requested (that is why NU-GOV-000 puts this document at P1).
3. The insurance underwriter. The renewal is priced partly on whether a written program is alive or shelfware. Fifty-two signed sheets a year is the difference, visible in one folder.

And one more, the one that matters most: the talk is ten minutes a week where the crew hears, out loud, that the rules are real. Crews that talk about hazards report near-misses. Crews that report near-misses don't repeat them. That chain starts here.

2. CADENCE — WHEN AND WHERE

• Weekly. Every crew, every week, no exceptions. A week with no talk is a miss, and a miss gets handled the same night per Standing Rule 5 (NU-GOV-004).
• The day: [Adam: pick the day — recommend Monday, at the yard, before rollout. Crews are already consolidated for the week's start, the Supervisor is present, and one talk covers everybody. Whatever day you pick, it never moves.]
• 5 to 10 minutes. At the truck. Standing. Nobody sits, nobody leans on a tailgate for half an hour. Standing is what keeps it ten minutes instead of thirty. When it starts turning into a meeting, it's over — write the open question on the sheet and move on.
• Before work, not after. A talk at the end of the day is a talk to men thinking about going home.
• The week's topic comes from the schedule (§4). Week number = the row. No picking favorites, no skipping the boring ones — the schedule is seasonally ordered on purpose, so the heat talks land in May–July and the low-light talks land at the time change.

3. WHO DELIVERS

The Supervisor owns the program; the Crew Lead owns delivery when crews are split. NU-SAF-100 §3 and §11 put the weekly talk on the Supervisor — this document keeps ownership there and puts delivery wherever the men actually are. The Supervisor's job every week: confirm every crew's sheet exists, chase the ones that don't, and keep the delivered-vs-scheduled count (that's a named leading indicator in NU-SAF-100 §11).

Delivering the talk is not a specialist skill. Reading the topic row the night before and saying it in your own words the next morning is the entire preparation. A Crew Lead who cannot do that has a bigger problem than toolbox talks.

4. THE 52-WEEK SCHEDULE (already built — use it, don't rebuild it)

The schedule lives at HANDOFF TO STEVE (Softr)\07_Toolbox_Talks_52wk.csv — 52 rows, one per week, seasonally ordered for Georgia. Each row carries the week number, the topic, the Nova source document and section, a why-it-matters line, and a season-critical flag.

How to use it:

1. Find the current week's row. Week 1 = the week containing the first Monday on or after January 1; count forward sequentially, 1 through 52, one row per calendar week. The CSV's Month column is descriptive seasonal framing only — never a schedule override — so do not skip or repeat rows to force the count and the Month column to match; ordinary sequential-count drift against the calendar is expected and needs no reconciliation. A 53rd week, when the calendar produces one, repeats Week 1 (program reset + Stop Work Authority).
2. Read the cited source section the night before. The talk IS that section, said out loud in the deliverer's own words. Examples straight from the schedule: Week 10 is "the buffer space stays EMPTY" from NU-SAF-105 §2; Week 18 is water/rest/shade from NU-SAF-112; Week 24 is "STAY ON THE MACHINE" from NU-SAF-110.
3. If the cited document isn't built yet (the schedule references the full planned library, and some rows cite documents still on the NU-GOV-000 gap list), the talk still runs — deliver it from the CSV row — the topic plus the why-it-matters line where one exists (a few rows are blank) — plus the nearest issued document, which is usually NU-SAF-100 and its Seven Rules. The schedule does not wait for the library.
4. Season-critical rows are never swapped by choice — an incident-driven talk (§5) is the one exception. A "Yes" in the Season_Critical column means the topic is timed to a real Georgia hazard window — heat, storms, the time change, the first freeze. Move anything else if you must (§5); a season-critical topic never leaves its month (§5).

The schedule is already in the Softr handoff folder as file 07. When the app lands, each talk becomes a session record against that table (§7).

5. INCIDENT-DRIVEN TALKS (the schedule yields to reality)

After any incident, injury, utility strike, or near-miss, the very next talk covers it. Not the scheduled topic — the thing that just happened, what the crew saw, and what changes. This is the single highest-value talk of the year every time it happens, because the crew is already paying attention.

• The incident record (NU-SAF-121) is the source material. The talk covers what happened, why, and the one thing that would have prevented it.
• No names get used for blame. The point is the hazard, not the man — NU-SAF-100 §1 already commits Nova to never disciplining the report. A talk that turns into a trial teaches the crew to stop reporting.
• The slide rule: the incident talk takes the week. The displaced topic runs the following week in place of that week's topic, and the topic displaced by THAT is dropped for the year and noted on the Supervisor's delivered-vs-scheduled log — the cascade stops at one drop. A season-critical topic (§4 item 4) is never the one dropped and never leaves its month: if the cascade would drop or move one, drop the nearest non-critical topic instead. If the displaced topic is itself season-critical and its month has no week left, it is neither moved nor dropped — it runs as a second talk (two-minute floor per §6) in the incident week. Extra talks are always allowed.
• The sheet's incident-driven box gets checked so the record shows why the schedule moved.

The same rule applies in miniature to changed conditions: new client site with its own rules, first day on a new kind of work, new equipment on the trailer — the Supervisor can call an off-schedule talk any week it's warranted. Extra talks are always allowed. Skipped talks never are.

6. THE STORM RULE AND THE MAKE-UP RULE

The two-minute version is acceptable in a storm. Zero is not.

When the weather is coming down or the day is already sideways, the talk shrinks to its skeleton: name the topic, say the why-line from the schedule, ask one question, pass the sheet. Two minutes, done, signed, photographed. What is never acceptable is "we'll catch it next week" — that's how one skipped week becomes a dead program by October.

The make-up rule — no man goes a week without the talk:

• A man absent on talk day gets the talk one-on-one from his Crew Lead on his first day back, before work — the two-minute version is fine.
• He signs the make-up line on that week's sheet (§7), and the sheet gets re-photographed to the same two places so the record is complete.
• Consolidated sheet handling and re-photographing: see §7.
• A new hire's first talk happens his first morning, whatever day that is — the current week's topic, delivered as part of the Day 1 standards flow (NU-PPL-405). He then falls into the normal cadence.
• A new hire's Day-1 talk is signed on the make-up table of the current week's sheet — write NEW HIRE next to the date — and the sheet is re-photographed to the same two places.
• Nobody's absence is the deliverer's excuse. "Half the crew was at the other site" means two talks were owed, not zero.

7. THE RECORD — NU-SAF-104-F SIGNED ATTENDANCE SHEET (Tier 4)

This is the form. Blank copies ride in every truck binder [Adam: approve adding a pad of blank 104-F sheets to the truck binder/loadout]. Print it, run the talk, sign it, photograph it.

NU-SAF-104-F — TOOLBOX TALK ATTENDANCE SHEET

Date: __ Week # / Topic (from 52-wk schedule): ______

Source doc & section: __ WO#(s) / Site(s) — write YARD for a consolidated yard talk and list every rolling crew's WO#: __

Incident-driven talk? ☐ No ☐ Yes — incident/near-miss ref (NU-SAF-121) (write date + WO# until NU-SAF-121 assigns incident numbers): __

Talk points actually used (3 lines, in your own words): 1. _________ 2. _________ 3. __________

Questions or hazards raised by the crew (write "none" if none — do not leave blank):

---

#	Attendee — print name	Signature
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

☐ Continued on second sheet — staple together and photograph both.

Make-up (absent on talk day — talk delivered first day back, before work):

Name	Date delivered	Attendee signature	Delivered by

Delivered by (print + sign): ______ Duration: _ min

Where the record goes — Standing Rule 4 (NU-GOV-004): photos go two places.

Consolidated sheet: it stays in the Supervisor's yard binder through the week, not a truck binder. Make-up talks and make-up signatures happen at the yard before rollout on the man's first morning back (start of day is at the yard — Card 05-A); the Supervisor then re-photographs the sheet to the same two places.

When the Softr app lands: the talk becomes a session record against the 52-week table (already delivered to Steve as handoff file 07) — date, topic auto-pulled by week, attendee checkboxes, delivered-by, and the photo attached. Attendance feeds the training matrix (NU-SAF-124) so one screen shows who has heard what. Until then, the photographed paper sheet IS the system, and it is a perfectly good one.

8. FIELD CARD — HOW TO RUN A TALK (Tier 3 — laminate for the truck binder)

NU-SAF-104-C — THE TEN-MINUTE TALK

The night before: 1. Pull this week's row from the 52-week schedule. 2. Read the section it cites. Five minutes.

At the truck, standing, before work: 3. Name the topic and say the why-line. One breath. 4. Make three points in your own words — what the rule is, what it looks like on THIS job, what it costs when it's skipped. 5. Ask one question: "Where would this bite us today?" Wait for a real answer. The answers are where the near-misses live — write them on the sheet. 6. Pass the sheet. Every man present prints and signs. You sign delivered-by.

Before rollout: 7. Photograph the sheet → crew group + WO folder. Two places, every time. 8. Absent men: talk + make-up line, first day back, before work.

Storm coming down? Two-minute version: topic, why-line, one question, sign, photo. Zero is not a version.

9. NEVER

• Never sign for a man who wasn't standing there, and never let a man sign a talk he didn't hear. A forged sheet is worse than a missing one — a missing sheet is a gap; a forged one turns the entire year of records into evidence against Nova the first time a lawyer finds the one man who can prove he was elsewhere.
• Never pass the sheet around without giving the talk. Pencil-whipping is the same forgery with extra steps.
• Never use the talk for discipline, production numbers, or scheduling. Ten minutes, one hazard, done. The moment the talk becomes the meeting where men get chewed out, they stop hearing it.
• Never skip a week because the topic "doesn't apply." Swap the topic (§5 rules); the week itself is untouchable, and season-critical topics are never swapped by choice — an incident-driven talk (§5) is the one exception.
• Never name-and-blame in an incident-driven talk. The hazard is the subject. The man is not.

10. DONE WHEN

Every crew heard one talk this week · every man present signed · the sheet photo is in the crew group AND the WO folder · absent men have a signed make-up line from their first day back · the Supervisor's delivered-vs-scheduled count says 100% — and if it doesn't, the miss was handled the same night, not Friday.

11. WHAT THIS DOCUMENT NEEDS FROM ADAM

1. Pick the talk day. Recommendation: Monday, at the yard, before rollout — crews are consolidated, the Supervisor delivers one talk to everyone, and the week starts on the record. Whatever you pick, it's permanent.
2. Approve the delivery split in §3. NU-SAF-100 §3/§11 currently reads as Supervisor-only; this document makes it Supervisor-when-consolidated, Crew-Lead-when-split. One line to reconcile at NU-SAF-100's next rev — and update the §11 cadence row to "5–10 min (2-min storm floor per NU-SAF-104 §6)" in the same rev. Same reconciliation for NU-PPL-405 — add "current week's toolbox talk, two-minute version OK (NU-SAF-104 §6)" to the Day 1 block list at its next rev. Until then the §6 new-hire bullet stands as the rule.
3. Set the NU-PPL-403 points line for a missed talk and for a sheet not photographed. Recommendation: treat the missing photo like any other missing record [Adam: confirm class and points — this document does not invent them].
4. Approve adding blank NU-SAF-104-F pads to the truck binder so the form is on every truck, not in a drawer at the yard.
5. Tell Steve the session-record shape for Softr: talks log against handoff file 07's table, attendance feeds NU-SAF-124. Build item, not a yes/no decision: add a Toolbox Talks delivered/scheduled column to NU-GOV-004-F (the Friday scorecard has no field for this today); until it's built, the Supervisor keeps the count on a separate running list per §7. While he's in file 07, have him fill the 17 blank why-it-matters lines (weeks 22, 23, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51) — 11 of them (23, 28, 35, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51) are season-critical weeks; do those first.

NU-SAF-104 · Rev 0.1 DRAFT · Nova Underground · Parent: NU-SAF-100 §5 element 5 · Topic source: HANDOFF file 07_Toolbox_Talks_52wk.csv (incorporated by reference) · Uncontrolled when printed.