There’s hardly any more worthwhile outcome to work towards improving business safety than a 0% safety incident rate in your business. After all, if you could get to the top of your market but doing so would require many staff members suffering difficulties, lifelong medical problems, or injuries, it wouldn’t be worth it at all. That’s just a hypothetical of course, and thankfully most modern businesses don’t even have to factor in that equation.
Yet even having one injury a year in your warehouse isn’t good enough. Zero acceptable incidents must always be the goal, with a no-tolerance policy for safety negligence. To achieve that, we must use everything at our disposal – regular reviews, accountability measures, investment in safety, and making certain safety principles can be followed without confusion.
However, the paradox here is that perfect is the enemy of good. If you wrap every staff member in cotton wool, they cannot work as they need to and you’ll likely cause a lot of frustration. So, how do you implement the right balancing act here? In this post, we’ll discuss a few techniques that could help you get started:
Outsourcing Vital Functions
Not everything has to be done in-house, especially when it comes to safety measures that require specialist knowledge or equipment. If there are safety protocols or checks you can outsource to experts, why not? Sometimes, letting specialists handle the more complex parts, like maintaining and certifying equipment, can reduce your risk.
For instance, you don’t want to gamble with something as essential as maintaining forklifts or keeping fire systems up to standard. If that responsibility falls to a trained, external party that always inspects your building and equipment and makes sure you’re integrating daily maintenance or keeping the spaces up to code, that’s one less thing on your plate and a lot fewer necessities to worry about going wrong.
You can even outsource whole departments if you want. You can let someone else worry about safety in your warehouse when you’re outsourcing it to a fulfilment centre that handles logistics.
Several Levels Of Systemic Oversight
Like with any business process worth keeping reliable, it’s smart to prepare by setting up multiple layers of oversight, and that includes your people, technology, and clear workflows. This might seem like overkill to some, but with everyone playing their part, you’re building a system that’s harder to break and can withstand difficulties, such as when retrofitting a manufacturing space for increased volume of orders.
Daily safety check-ins could be a good place to start. You may have managers check certain areas and equipment while another layer, like health and safety officers or team leaders, double-check or cross-reference any findings that have been considered. Maybe you use a software tool that logs issues as soon as they happen, so it can’t be ignored or forgotten in the daily rush, allowing tasks to be assigned up the chain. That way, one person’s failing or focus doesn’t have to cause issues, be that due to inattention, too much workload, or simply not wanting to report an issue because it may reflect badly on them.
Regular Safety Equipment Inspection & Replacement
Much business advice implies that once invested in solid safety gear or installed the best equipment, you’re set. Yet of couse, safety gear doesn’t last forever. Items get worn out, and when they do, it’s easy to miss until something goes wrong. Even thick aprons you ask your restaurant staff to wear as they clean the kitchen may wear down in time, lessening its possible effectiveness.
Even the most seemingly reliable items like hard hats, gloves, or fire extinguishers might seem durable, but their lifespan can still catch you off guard. The last thing you want is for an electrical fire extinguisher to be too old for effective use after a fire starts out. Weekly inspections are essential. Replacement after one incident is also essential. For example, a hairline crack in a hard hat might not seem that bad, but if it’s hit again, the protective effect may be completely limited.
Accountability With Real Praise & Disciplinary Metrics
Accountability seems obvious on the surface – if someone causes potential harm due to negligence or not following procedure, they should be disciplined appropriately. A lack of accountability can lead even the most forthright employee to cut corners given the right situation, and in some cases that can lead to harm.
When improving business safety, there’s a balance in play. You want to encourage safe behavior, but you don’t want people to feel like they’re walking on eggshells. On the positive side, you could set up a reward system for teams or individuals who consistently follow safety protocols or who have no incidents in a year (though make sure this doesn’t discourage reporting).Contrary to that, there need to be clear consequences for safety violations. These should be spelled out in your safety policy and applied consistently, but also with a goal for learning and understanding the systemic issues at play. Even if it’s down to one person, what if they were tired due to being overworked? It’s worth using any issues, even any near-misses, to learn and correct your forward course.
With this advice, we hope you can achieve a figure of zero safety incidents throughout all of your time operating a business.
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