Has your warehouse undergone a recent scourge of accidents and incidents that have caused injuries? Now, you no longer have to rely on the old saying that “accidents happen”. Nevertheless what may be considered a routine and a part of everyday business does not have to be accepted as rudimentary. Accidents are often caused by events that can be avoided. Thus there are ways you can minimize and mitigate the effects of accidents in the warehouse through proper prevention and awareness, but sometimes you are going to required legal assistance of a local injury lawyer. Ensuring regulatory compliance, promoting safety culture, and fostering continuous improvement are just three ways you can bolster workplace safety. Here are our top tips to help your business succeed in avoiding accidents and incidents in the warehouse:

1) Enforce Regulatory Compliance – Enforcing regulatory compliance is a sure-fire way to assure your organization is playing by the rules. How? Because these regulations are designed with safety first and foremost in mind. There are several leading bodies that contribute to the diadem of safety. The most notable names are OSHA, NIOSH, and ICS. Through regularly surveying and keeping up with their directives and standards, managers and administrators can derive up-to-date methodologies to drive workplace safety. Employers and staff can even visit OSHA’s website to learn their about their newest practices toward safety on a daily basis. These updates are proven to remove the obsolete practices that have been shown to be no longer effective in employee welfare.

2) Foster Continuous Improvement – The term is something that speaks for itself. Fostering continuous improvement is a mindset. It goes beyond best business practices or integrating the latest trends and is instead grounded in a commitment to performing at the highest standard on a consistent basis. While some may say one should work smarter and not harder, continuous improvement says that one should work better. This includes finding streamlined and safe measures to carry out daily operations. This attitude is independent of regulatory compliance or even safety culture promotion because it is a set of beliefs that all personnel must buy in to, to see in full effect.

3) Promote Safety Culture – The foundation of avoiding accidents is promoting safety culture. There are many ways one can achieve this. First and foremost, assure all staff and employees have the appropriate PPE to don when handling volatile materials. Following this up with education seminars on hazardous materials and confined spaces can yield dividends in that workers are more astute on how to tackle those challenging situations and scenarios bound to create the most accidents. Additionally, accountability from the top-to-bottom can be instrumental in achieving a better safety culture in that employees know who they can turn to when they need to, in the event of a question or a perceived danger. In doing this, communication is optimized, which has been proven to be the best way to prevent accidents in the future. More often than not, failure to communicate a hazard is more the cause of an incident than one actually failing to perceive it.