Safety in the workplace isn’t simply a trendy buzzword. These days, safety is something employers take seriously. Keeping the warehouse accident and injury free improves employee morale, reduces absenteeism, and promotes loyalty among employees. It also saves businesses big money as it helps to keep insurances costs down. It helps to revisit your own warehouse safety procedures and protocols periodically. These are the things you want to see high on your list.
Continuous Safety Education and Training
By offering continuous safety education and training you ensure that everyone has adequate training and a few refresher courses along the way. Many businesses make safety training part of the employee welcome process and then offer follow-up training for all employees every four to six months.
Training needs to cover areas such as chemical burns and spills, proper pallet stacking procedures, safety procedures, and proper protocols when accidents and/or injuries occur.
This helps to ensure that your employees have the most recent information available, that they are properly using safety equipment the company provides for them, and follows safety procedures unequivocally.
Create and Enforce Pro-Safety Policies in the Workplace
Enforcement is often the hardest part — especially among workers who have been doing things a certain way for decades. That’s why it’s so important to have consequences for failure to comply with safety policies — including the use of safety equipment.
Practice Better Floor Safety
Clear floors reduce risks of trips,slips, and falls in the workplace. Many workplace injuries could be easily avoided simply by cleaning up spills immediately and removing obstructions from walkways. Trips and falls can lead to injuries, employee absenteeism, and down time or lag time for the entire line.
Also invest in anti-slip floor mats. These mats serve dual purposes. First, they prevent slips that are common on some warehouse flooring surfaces. Second, they serve to offer cushioning support to knees and other joints that tend to get achy or that develop an overuse injury after long hours of standing in one spot.
Forklift Operations
Forklifts are heavy equipment that pose many risks when used improperly. Only highly trained members of staff should ever operate forklifts on your business property. Even then, proper attention must be paid to keep speeds low and operate forklifts safely. Additionally, you must keep your forklifts in a good state of repair. Avoid operating forklifts with mechanical problems and keep areas where forklifts operate well-ventilated to avoid carbon monoxide buildup from the exhaust.
Simple measure, go a long way to promoting safety in the workplace. However, sometimes your best efforts are not enough to avoid all accidents and injuries. That’s why warehouse owners need workers’ compensation insurance — to help your employees and your business to recover when accidents take place.
