Free toolbox talk template
A printable form with a signature sheet, and a spreadsheet log for tracking talks across the year. No email, no signup, no watermark.
What is in them
The PDF is one page, built to be printed and clipped to a board. Company, date, job and site across the top, the topic, room for what was actually covered, a box for the hazards identified on that site that day, ten signature rows, and a supervisor sign-off.
The spreadsheet is the year view: one row per talk, with date, job, site, topic, who led it, how many attended, hazards and notes. Filters are on and the header row is frozen, so you can pull up every talk on one job in a couple of clicks when somebody asks. There is a second tab explaining how to use it, because a template that needs explaining somewhere else usually does not get used.
The one field people skip
Hazards identified on this site today. It is tempting to write the generic hazards from whatever topic you picked, and that is the version that reads as paperwork. The useful version names the open trench on the north side, the overhead line the excavator swings under, the plate that has been rocking since Tuesday.
It takes the same thirty seconds and it is the difference between a record that shows you read something out and one that shows you looked at the site. If you need topics to work through, we published 25 toolbox talk topics for dirt crews.
Common questions
The date, the job and site, the topic, what was actually covered, the hazards identified on that site that day, and a signature from everyone who attended. The hazards line is the one people skip and the one that matters: a record listing generic hazards from the topic sheet shows you read something out, while a record naming the open trench and the overhead line on that particular morning shows you looked at the site.
Short enough that people listen. Ten to fifteen minutes is normal, and one specific hazard covered properly beats five covered as a list. The talk is not the deliverable; the crew noticing the thing at 2pm is the deliverable.
What is required varies by jurisdiction and by who you work for, and a general contractor's requirements are often stricter than the law's. The practical answer is simpler than the legal one: keep them regardless. An insurer, a GC or an inspector asking for your safety program is the moment you find out whether it exists on paper, and an unrecorded talk is one that did not happen as far as anyone else is concerned.
Yes. No email, no signup, no watermark. Download it, change it, put your own logo on it. We make software for contractors and we would rather you knew we exist; that is the entire arrangement.
Keep them somewhere that is not a truck. The most common failure is not a missing talk, it is a signed form that lived in a folder in a pickup that got traded in. The Excel log is there for exactly that reason: it records that the talk happened and when, so the paper is corroboration rather than the only copy.
When the folder in the truck stops being good enough
The paper works until you have three crews and somebody asks for a year of records on a specific job. TrackOver runs the talk from the phone, captures the signatures on screen, and keeps every record against the job it belongs to, so producing them is a search rather than an afternoon. Free plan, no card.