Safety Meeting Topics for Warehouse Workers

Warehouse safety, including personnel accidents and damage to products and/or equipment, are a costly aspect of warehouse work, but it doesn’t have to be. While you can never prevent all incidents, there are ways to help mitigate them with proper training, meetings and conversations.

Discussing these warehouse safety topics together will invite your employees to take an active step in recognizing and correcting hazards while ensuring a safe work environment.

Recent Warehouse Safety Topics:

Loading Dock Safety

Every dock must have the means to restrain a vehicle. Recent innovations have opened the door to optimizing and improving loading dock safety. Often the busiest area of a warehouse, the loading dock is prone to many hazards such as forklifts running out of the dock, pedestrian/forklift collision and a variety of early departure accidents. Safety professionals should evaluate their vehicle restraint policy and consider adding Light Communication or an automatic vehicle restraint to ensure your workers are safe and abiding by regulatory guidelines.

Drive Approach Safety

A backing trailer can be deceptively quiet because the tractor is over 70’ away and its engine noise can be obscured by ambient noise. In fact, OSHA has identified semi-tractor trailers as the second leading cause of backover fatalities in the United States. To help keep workers aware of a trailer’s presence, facilities can implement new technologies like Approach-Vu™ to employ audible and visual motion-activated alarms. Facilities that want to keep boots off the ground can also consider Lok-Vu™ to visually monitor trailer presence and lock verification.

Pedestrian / Forklift Safety

With tens of thousands of forklift-related injuries reported each year with millions in immediate costs incurred, ensuring your employees understand and abide by forklift safety guidelines is crucial to your warehouse running smoothly and limiting its risk to people and products. These Hazard Recognition and Communication solutions help make that possible. Additionally, the Safe-T-Signal® Warning system is a four-way warehouse traffic sensor that provides a great solution for helping to ensure both pedestrians and vehicle operators avoid bumping into each other in the warehouse.

Area Protection and Pedestrian Safety

Protecting employees while increasing efficiency and traffic flow can be challenging. Warehouse workers oftentimes work in hazardous settings, with equipment running and work from elevated platforms present, the need for protection systems has never been greater. Work-related injuries are very common, especially with aging workforces. Proper protection can be accomplished through warehouse solutions like safety barriers, ergonomic powered dock gates and machine guarding.

Conveyor Safety

Proper inspection, guarding and training can reduce a workers' risk of falling products, being injuring, caught in pinch points, or improper worker lifting or overexertion.

Smart Data & Analytics: Proactive Approach to Safety

For an advanced proactive approach to warehouse safety, facilities can implement the Smart Data & Analytics platform Warehouse Safety Software Module for improved data collection capabilities. Rite-Hite's software solutions allow facility managers to receive actionable insights, discover new opportunities, and develop new business processes from the data. This dynamic tool helps safety professionals proactively identify and improve the behaviors of their workers when enabled with Rite-Hite equipment. The constantly collected data distills into analytics to inform them about employee training opportunities, equipment needs and process improvements by monitoring safety-related events at the loading dock, inside the plant and at busy intersections.

OSHA Safety Meeting Topics

Rite-Hite is best equipped to provide solutions for the topics above, but plenty of other areas deserve consideration when addressing safety in your warehouse. Please refer to the list below for additional information or guidance and visit the OSHA Pocket Guide for Warehouse Worker Safety.

Other Topics to Consider:

• Hazardous Material Safety
• Material Handling and Storage Protection
• Charging Stations
• Exit Routes
• Walking and Working Surfaces
• Emergency Procedures
• Employee Concerns or Comments

There’s no cure-all to end employee accidents or damage to products or equipment. However, keeping an open dialogue with your employees and following stringent safety rules that conform to set regulations will ultimately leave your warehouse and all personnel in the best position to reduce risk and increase efficiency. Regular training and ongoing conversations reinforce safe work and increase awareness of our safety and, ultimately improve the safety and efficiency of the company as a whole.