Warehouse Wednesday: 8 Practices to Add to Your Warehouse Safety Checklist

Promoting warehouse safety is a great way to boost employee productivity and morale. Preventing common warehouse accidents is essential for encouraging warehouse safety. Acting before an accident happens is more effective than reacting to an accident.

It can be difficult determining which OSHA regulations apply to your warehouse. This guide will help outline how you can promote warehouse safety.

1. Clear Signs

Safety instruction signs are an essential part of every warehouse. Bold letters to show instructions, cautions, and dangers will help catch employees' attention. Asking employees where posted signage is will help enhance recognition. Marking protocols such as:

Eye wash stations
Emergency exits
Fire extinguishers
COVID-19 regulations
Dangers
Cautions
Instructions

These markings can help employees determine how to react to such situations.

2. Enforce Appropriate Clothing

Providing clear guidelines on appropriate work attire prevents potential accidents. Suggestions include prohibiting open-toed shoes and baggy clothing. These items can get caught in machinery and cause injury.

3. Keep Your Workplace Clean

Prevent slips, trips, and falls by enforcing a clean warehouse. Employees should be sure to clean up after themselves before leaving on break or leaving for the day.

It takes a team effort to ensure the warehouse is clean. Encouraging workers to clean their area and after themselves helps maintain the environment.

Providing cubbies where employees can store personal items prevents tripping hazards and clutter.

Encouraging employees to take pride in where they work is essential. Cleaning up spills and helping coworkers is a great way to see that your staff cares.

4. Invest in Safety

Prevention is the best way to ensure safety in any warehouse setting. Day-to-day operations are unpredictable. Even the best supervisor can not predict if an employee will wreck a forklift or a product will fall off a shelf. Though a supervisor cannot predict an accident, they can

prevent them.

The solutions are easy to put in place. Installing Rack netting, conveyor netting, safety barriers, and loading dock solutions is a great start.

Acting before an accident occurs is a great way to show employees that you care about their safety.

5. Machinery Safety

Only trained employees should operate heavy machinery. It takes skill and knowledge to navigate both the equipment and warehouse safely.

For employees who are not operating, a clear forklift route can help them steer clear. This can assure the driver that their coworkers will not walk in their way.

When operating machinery, workers should wear proper protection. This includes but is not limited to goggles, gloves, and hard hats.

Untrained employees should not have easy access to dangerous machinery. Blocking untrained employees from access to machinery will protect all parties involved.

6. Safety Training

Offering opportunities for employees to receive extra safety training is beneficial. This can allow new employees to have proper training on equipment. It is always helpful to have many workers trained in the same area in case of a sick day or vacation.

Also, employees can discuss what they learned from the training. This can allow them to extend the knowledge of the information they did not catch at first.

Workers' training in safety topics they find interesting helps enhance their skills. This can include providing forklift training for deserving employees.

Administered safety training educates workers on what to do in hazardous situations. Training in first aid, accident reporting, and CPR are beneficial to enhancing employee knowledge.

7. Inspect Equipment

Broken equipment is dangerous to any warehouse setting. Employees and supervisors should encourage each other to inspect all equipment before use.

Even if the equipment is as simple as a glove, if it has a hole, it will not protect the employee. Taking a small amount of time to inspect equipment before use is essential.

8. Be Resourceful

Every individual has a set of unique skills and talents. Understanding your worker's talents can promote a safe environment. For example, if an employee has experience in sector A, assigning them to sector B could be dangerous as they are unaware of potential risks.

Encourage skills to grow, and be resourceful about what task you assign employees. No one is a master of everything. Allow workers to master their specialized skills. Mastering skills leads to passion, which leads to productivity and can promote safety.

Ask yourself these three reliable questions whenever enforcing warehouse safety:

Are there OSHA regulations specified in my field?
Do my employees feel safe coming to work?
What products can I invest in to promote safety?

Safety is a marathon, not a sprint. Learning about requirements and recommendations is essential. Effective action must take place whenever improving warehouse safety.