For many businesses, the warehouse is the beating heart that supports the rest of it. Making good use of your warehouse space can help you find and move your assets much more easily, and can prevent you from the expensive loss that can plague many a company. However, that beating heart needs to be healthy to work at its best. Here, we’re going to look at essential warehouse safety tips to keep in mind, and how they can make the warehouse more productive as well.
Ensure areas are clean and organized
The first thing to ensure that mess is kept to a minimum in your warehouse. Any empty boxes or containers should be tidied away immediately by the person who emptied them. There should never be any packing materials left on the floor, not even temporarily for those areas used most often as walkways and driving routes for forklifts and other equipment. Hire a cleaning team to keep the floors and shelves in good condition as well.
Don’t allow unskilled use of equipment
All too often, the standards can start to slip in a warehouse and you can find that people who aren’t trained to use equipment such as forklifts might get behind the wheel of them, even if it’s just to drive them to where they’re usually parked. This is unacceptable and a leading cause of warehouse accidents. Make sure that you invest in the necessary forklift training (or training for any other machines in the warehouse) if you’re expecting your workers to use them.
Define pathways for people and machines
You’re going to have a lot of moving people and likely some moving machinery in your warehouse and you must ensure that they’re able to share the space effectively. Make use of safety signs and floor markers to dictate where machines must slow down and where people must be extra aware of their surroundings. You should also mark off any areas where items such as pallets and boxes should never be left down.
Ensure a good supply of PPE
Given the inherent risk of working in a warehouse, you must make sure that your workers are equipped to protect them from risk in many different ways. Ensuring a good selection of personal protective equipment means knowing what to wear in any given work situation, such as gloves, goggles, high-vis gear, and the like. You also have to inspect your PPE regularly to make sure that you have enough of what you need and that it’s in reliable condition.
Identify and control hazards
Aside from all of the potential risks mentioned above, you should ensure that you’re taking pains to keep note of any other hazards, including fire hazards, electrical hazards, and so on. With a warehouse safety audit, you can get a more specific idea of what kinds of risks you have to mitigate and how you can do it.
The cost of an unsafe warehouse is simply too high to tolerate. Hopefully, the tips above help you ensure the safety standards that you need.
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