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Hello all, I’m Marty and this is Warehouse and Operations as a Career. Last week we were in the Midwest, we had the opportunity to visit a couple of different types of distribution facilities and speak with several associates, Unloaders, Selectors and forklift drivers, I had a really good conversation with a sanitation lead. It’s great to see all the passion and professionalism, I guess it’s the word pride that I’m looking for. Anyway, I enjoyed visiting with all these professionals. This week I’m over in the Southwest and visiting the Production and Manufacturing sides of the industry. No manner where I go or what part of our industry, I’m getting to look at I so enjoy getting to visit with the employees. There’s a lot of up and coming success stories out there! Keep up the great work ladies and gentlemen, I know it appreciated by your management teams and it’ll get you to those goals, keep working the plan! Oh, saying that reminded me of making money, that’s why we’re all working in the first place right? So, I’ve mentioned, a couple of times probably, another podcast I listen too called Unlocking the secret of living rich with Cindy B Brown. As I’ve said, I’m not affiliated with it at all, but you should check out her last episode titled #91 Creative Savings Strategies. Talk about making money, her tips last week can actually increase our net, in our pocket money at the end of each year! Be sure to check it out if you have the time. I strayed again, so let’s talk about Operations for the next few minutes!
About 50% of these trips involved Safety, instructing Safety, investigating reports and just visiting with Safety managers or those responsible for loss and prevention. WAOC received a short message, a question really, I guess, it kind of fits with my recent travels so I wanted to share parts of it with you today. It starts by saying I’ve really enjoyed your recent episodes on all the different positions in warehousing, I myself started unloading railcars, moved to be a runner, then a receiver and now I am a forklift driver, I love my old Toyota counterbalance side shifter. I understand the importance of safety and I pay attention to what I’m doing but those everyday safety meetings and repeating the same things over and over again… Lets be honest it’s a waste of time. It’s not just my manager, it’s every company it seems. Shouldn’t we just take a course, sign off on it and go to work every day? It’s important but most people just quit listening.
First, I want to thank you for writing us, and you’d be surprised how often I hear or see the same thing. And I think that’s exactly why it has to be brought up every day. I mean it has to be interesting, it has to cover real life situations that pertain to our individual positions and I believe we have to be able to relate to it. I’d love to hear from a few of our listeners that are responsible for delivering those start-up and safety meetings. Maybe a Supervisor or Manager, maybe a Safety director, how do you keep your associates engaged? Send us some of your secrets to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com and we’ll share your thoughts with the group!
You’ve all heard me talk about the importance of a good Near Miss Program, I think these programs can solve all these opportunities. By us employees being the ones observing a near miss, something we’ve seen in our aisles or on our docks and documenting it it’ll give our supervisors a real-life situation to share with our whole team. The little things are of course a quick fix, and the larger issues can be passed on to our company’s safety committees or upper management to get corrected. As we’ve learned, if its documented it happened, it has to be addressed to some degree, and anything that’s not documented, we’ll it never really happened or happens at all! What better way to keep a topic or conversation interesting than to participate in it right?
I’ve always believed the only way to keep a recurring topic interesting, or for it to have any daily value at all is that it needs to be second nature to us as humans. It has to be our culture, on the fore front of our minds, kind of intertwined in our daily routines. We wake up, use the restroom, think of breakfast, go to work, probably take the same route to work every day, plan for lunch, get off, enjoy the family and go to bed. Very routine but very interesting. Oh, there’s other things like school for the kiddos, their soccer, football and baseball games, paying bills etc. but it’s all in the forefront of our minds. I think we find it interesting because we’ve built it into our daily lives. All that is part of our culture now, Safety has to be a part of that culture, and it has to be a part of our work culture too. I think all the things that are discussed at our startup and safety meetings can really enforce that Safety Culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_culture You know I’m a look it up kind of guy, states Safety culture is the collection of the beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to risks within an organization, such as a workplace or community.[1][2] Safety culture is a part of organizational culture, and has been described in a variety of ways.
Notice the word employees, that’s us! It goes on to mention that safety culture is part of an organizational culture. That’s our employers being committed to us employees and having great policies in place, a good solid process.
I agree that things can get routine, especially our safety topics but as I’m always mentioning, we employees can participate in them and make them much more interesting. After all we or have seen an example of every topic our manager has ever spoken too. What a great way of getting noticed, helping them get their message across to our peers. We all know the rules and we know why their important but occasionally we go around them, and then there’s incidents and consequences.
Here’s a great example of just that. I heard about an experienced forklift operator needing the top pallet of a 3 stack, you know, where there’s 3 partial pallets stacked on top of each other and he was retrieving it off the top rack at his facility. Instead of retrieving or lifting all three he chose to try and lift just the top one. Of course, this positioned his freight guard only inches from the ceiling so when he started backing up with the pallet the guard sheared off a sprinkler head. If you’ve ever seen a sprinkler head go off you know that’s a pure mess, an expensive mess. You’ll lose product, maybe even mess up the electronics within the lift. And that water can be nasty, its been in those pipes for a long time! Its hard to apply the word accident there. He knew better, it was a stated rule not to do it, everyone around him knew it. Yet it happened. If it had been the culture to never make a lift like that it may have never happened. Those 2 minutes saved cost thousands of dollars, a whole lot of time cleaning it up and a record in his employee and safety files.
And here’s a good one. So, an order selector was at a slot, off of his triple jack and selecting 9 cases from the slot. By all indications and witness statements he was pulled over to the side of the aisle as he should’ve been. Another selector, in a bit of a hurry, tried squeezing by him, a bit too close to his last pallet and nudged the other machine forward squeezing the first gentleman’s leg between his jack housing and the upright. Luckily, he wasn’t permanently injured or disabled, this could have been a bad incident. Again, its hard for me to use the word accident here. The second selector knew better, he felt really bad about it, he was just hurrying and didn’t follow the rules or do what he knew to do. Would a strong culture of safety prevent this one? I feel of course it would have, the thought process would have been to wait and moving forward would have never entered his mind.
Check out episode 31 of the The Safety Pro Podcast with Blaine Hoffman. Its titled A process to change workplace safety culture, I think you’ll enjoy it, I know I learned a lot from it!
So why are those daily meeting important? It’s our health and safety we need to be considering. Its our peers and teammates health and safety, and it’s our company’s investment in us as employees. Its our responsibility, and its our job. I urge each of us to do our part, be a part of our safety teams and coach others, get them to commit to a strong safety culture at your facility.
A few examples of that culture, there’s so many, here’s two that I witnessed just in the last 2 weeks. I loved this one. Every time the floor Supervisor meets one of his department’s employees there’s a little fist bump. Walking to the breakroom, meeting in the aisles, every time they pass each other. Its like a greeting, every time they’re within arm’s reach. I asked an employee about it and was told it means I’ve got this; I’m committed to my task and to do it safely. That’s a strong safety culture, its first on everyone’s mind. I was over at the Distribution Training Center last Saturday. Just stopping in, taking care of some reporting. An associate was shutting down for the day and locking everything up. He went over to the equipment and checked out the chargers and the plugs on the units. He then proceeded to check all the doors, docks and gates. I asked why he took the time to check on the equipment and all the doors that we hadn’t used any of them? His reply was that he wanted to make sure the equipment was charged and ready for Monday and he’d just rechecked the docks and doors just to be sure. He said we have each other’s backs, and I wanted to make sure the plate was set for the men and women Monday morning. Again, it was second nature, a part of his team’s routine. If I hadn’t asked the question, he’d have never thought about it.
Safety is all our jobs. We talk a lot about it here at WAOC, how its our first priority, our responsibility, and how effective it can be. It’ll help reduce cost, downtime and safe lives. Being educated in safety will get us noticed by our management teams too, I hope that education is a part of all our plans, both short term and long terms plans!
A few things we can each do are
- Always use our safety equipment and PPE’s! If we need help picking up a box, lets go get someone to help us. Don’t try scooting that pallet with your foot, go get a pallet jack. If the machine we’re operating has 10 different guards, use all 10 guards. They are there for a reason, even if we’re not working at that particular station make sure there in the proper place! We may be asked to wear steel toe footwear, were being asked because the risk of an injury is present. Keep that safety vest and safety goggles on if we’re suppose to use them. Again, it’s probably been determined we need them.
- Use your Near Miss program! There’s no better way to identify the hazards around us. If your facility doesn’t have such a program, bring it up, put it together for your supervisor, at least suggest it. You’ll be surprised at his or her response I bet.
- Keep our work areas clean. Keep our pallets stacked at the proper height and separate the good wood from the bad. This one is easy, and you’d be surprised how many little incidents occur because of poor housekeeping.
- An inspection list. I’ve always used an inspection list. Just a little reminder to check things like the dock plates in my area. The hydraulics or the pneumatic action rods, or the dock lights. My list keeps me from getting lazy or in a rut. Keeping our work areas clean and in good working order is hard work!
- Communicate! If you’re a supervisor, communicate to your teams. And if you’re an employee communicate with your management and your teammates. As we’ve learned here at WAOC, communication is success!
There’s 5 things off the top of my head. There are literally 100’s of other things we can do to help keep our workplace safe and everyone healthy. It’s a team effort, or a safety culture if you will!
We’ll I hope we’ve answered the question of why safety is such a big part of our shifts and maybe given you a few ideas on how to improve and implement that safety culture at your facility. I hope you take a few minutes and check out the two other podcast I mentioned earlier, I’m not affiliated with either, I just learn from them and you can too! I hope to run into you on either our Facebook or Twitter feeds this week where we can be found @whseandops. Until next week, lets all pick 1 safety statement for each day next week and share it with our teams and peers, I bet you’ll see that culture taking hold and start growing! Be safe out their ladies and gentlemen!