A daily pre-start is the ten minutes before the tools come out: what are we doing today, what could hurt us, and what are we putting in place about it. This form turns that conversation into a record — task by task, hazard by hazard, with every crew member's signature against the plan they were briefed on.
It is a plan, not an inspection
Most documents in this category are lists of conditions to verify. This one is different in kind: the crew writes down what they are about to do, and then assesses each task before doing it. The value is in the order — hazards identified before the work starts, not after.
That is why the task breakdown repeats. A crew doing three different things today fills it in three times, and each one gets its own hazards and its own controls. Forcing three unrelated jobs through a single hazard list is how pre-starts turn into a ritual nobody reads.
The hierarchy of control, in the order it is meant to be used
The control categories are offered in a deliberate order, and it is the order that carries the meaning:
- Eliminate — do not do the thing. The only control that cannot fail.
- Substitute — do a different, less dangerous thing instead.
- Engineer — put something physical between the person and the hazard.
- Administrative — change the way people work: permits, sequencing, training.
- PPE — protect the person when everything above has been exhausted.
Why every crew member signs
A pre-start signed only by a supervisor records that a supervisor thought about the work. A pre-start signed by everybody records that everybody was told — and that is the thing anyone asks about afterwards.
The signature is not an assessment of the person and it is not an admission of anything. It says: I was here, I heard the plan, I know what we decided about the hazards. Keep the list open as people arrive and add late starters rather than leaving them off.
Do it out loud
A pre-start is already a spoken event — somebody stands in front of a crew and talks through the day. The paperwork is usually done afterwards, from memory, by one person with a clipboard.
Speak while you walk, and the document the law or the client wants writes itself. Say the tasks and the hazards as you brief them and the form fills as you talk, which means the record matches the briefing rather than a tidied-up version of it written twenty minutes later.
Common questions
What is the difference between a pre-start and a Take 5?
Scale and audience. A pre-start covers a crew and a whole shift and is usually led by a supervisor. A Take 5 is one person, one task, taken immediately before starting it — often several times a day. They complement each other: the pre-start sets the plan, the Take 5 checks that the plan still holds at the moment of doing.
Is a pre-start the same as a toolbox talk?
No, although they often happen in the same huddle. A toolbox talk is training on a topic — a safety subject explained to a crew. A pre-start is planning for a specific day's specific work. A crew can be given an excellent toolbox talk on silica and still have no plan for today.
How long should this take?
Ten minutes for a crew doing familiar work, longer on the first day of a new activity. If it routinely takes thirty, the tasks are probably being broken down more finely than the risk requires.
What if the work changes during the day?
Then the pre-start no longer covers it, and the honest thing is a new one — or at minimum a Take 5 by whoever is doing the changed task. The most common failure in this document is a plan written at 7am for work that stopped resembling it by 10.