Tips to Help Protect Your Warehouse Employees

Warehouse safety is an issue that should receive attention from top leadership. 

Most manufacturing warehouses have a lot of items moving in and out on a regular basis. In addition to traffic, aisles and shelving create additional hazards and dangers. To successfully address safety within your warehouse, you need data. As management consultant Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

Some key metrics to review:

Number of incidents and injuries is a lagging indicator. Though it shows that something went wrong after it happened, the information can still be useful to identify patterns, areas of concern, and effectiveness of implemented changes.

Lost time is also a lagging indicator. Lost time is production time that is lost due to unplanned shutdowns. Tracking it can show how much safety issues are costing your company. This data should be used to develop a specific training program to prevent lost time and can help you see the need for a return-to-work program.

Near misses can be used to identify issues that have not caused an incident but could. If a near miss is reported, you should assign your safety team to investigate. To truly benefit from this leading indicator, you need to establish a culture where employees feel comfortable speaking up about potential safety issues. Near misses sometimes result from employees using shortcuts or ignoring safety procedures. They may think they cannot bring it to anyone’s attention since they did not follow protocol and might be subject to corrective action. However, you should be asking why employees are sidestepping safety protocols. This is when employees and your safety team should review current practices and determine if there are better ways to prevent the near miss.  

In addition to traditional safety metrics, you can use work-standard data and employee feedback metrics.

If you have developed standards for your warehouse staff to perform certain tasks, you can measure against those standards when incidents or near misses happen. Warehouse incidents often happen when employees work extra shifts, perform tasks they are not familiar with, work at odd hours, or hurry due to task standards or deadlines. Having task standards and requiring employees to log their time can provide a wealth of data to help improve your warehouse safety. You can then focus on eliminating the root cause.

You should review and analyze the safety data on a regular basis, and it should be included in your standard reports. Your safety data should be visible not only to your safety team but to all within the plant. This will encourage employees to help identify solutions and improve areas of near misses.

Some simple tools you can use to improve your safety metrics are lean tools, workplace organization, 5S, warehouse layout, pull vs. push manufacturing principles, and value stream mapping of warehouse tasks and material flow. These tools can help reduce the risk of an incident by streamlining processes. In addition, safety training, job rotation, weekly safety toolbox talks, employee safety committees, and walkthroughs can help identify and eliminate hazards and issues within your warehouse.

As stated above, collecting and reviewing data as a team is key to improving your warehouse safety.