Forklift safety is an essential skill to emphasize when teaching your employees how to operate a forklift to become certified. A good way to help build on the topics of forklift safety is to establish a forklift safety culture. Here are some steps to build your forklift safety culture.
Look Over the Current Status of Your Safety Culture
Safety culture begins with analyzing where your company currently stands through the following questions. You should ask these questions when you’re looking to make changes.
- Do your employees know about the safety standards that are currently in place, and are they aware of how up-to-date they are?
- How often is safety promoted and communicated between the chain of command and its employees?
- Do you often find mistakes or flaws?
- Are the safety standards accessible, and do they outline a breakdown of preventing safety hazards from happening?
Check For a Safe Environment
If you punish your employees for reporting instances of safety hazards, your safety culture is toxic. You can improve this by establishing an investigation system where you search for the cause of a safety violation. Finding the root cause of a problem will help prevent future complications.
Keep Teaching About Safety
Especially with new hires waiting to be certified, constantly teaching and updating information is essential. This also ensures your employees are meeting the OSHA forklift training requirements. Hold weekly meetings and classes to help teach your employees the importance of a safety culture and why personnel should practice it.
Keep Checking Your Progress
Speaking about safety culture for forklifts is not a one-time thing. It’s something that should be a constant practice among you and your company. Following this step will help you learn the importance of keeping up to date on the status of all employees, any safety hazards that occur, and how to fix them. Set up daily morning meetings and set goals to help encourage other workers to be more mindful when discussing and practicing forklift safety.
Discuss with your team how you can follow these steps to build your forklift safety culture within your company. While following these steps, reach out to First Quality Forklift Training for the best possible programs to help train and certify your employees. Not only will you work with a certified forklift operator, but they’ll also be certified in forklift safety culture.