Don’t take a cartoon approach

Ruth Waring, managing director of Labyrinth Consulting tackled preventing loading bay drive-aways and said companies should clearly define what constitutes a near miss.

“Some warehouse workers think it’s only a near miss if it’s a ‘Tom and Jerry’ style leap out of the way of danger at the last second,” she said.

“In fact, it’s about spotting those little things that are not quite right, which in the wrong circumstances could lead to an accident.”

Companies must also ensure near miss reporting is everybody’s responsibility.

“Perhaps rename near misses ‘Great Catches’ or ‘Great Saves’ to give it a more positive connotation,” added Ruth.

“And once they are spotted, make sure they are not forgotten. Workers should walk management through near misses, or take video footage, to make sure it is not ignored or forgotten down the line.”

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Ruth also cautions that companies are often very good at safety within a building, but ‘switch off’ in the loading area.

“It’s important to decide who owns the gap,” Ruth explains. “Is it the client, the 3PL or the haulier? If you are not sure, take the responsibility to determine this.”

Ruth also said look out for exceptional events that may throw otherwise sound health & safety practice out of kilter. This could be the arrival of foreign drivers with poor English, or drivers unfamiliar with your site. These could be, for example, agency drivers or drivers on a backhaul route that come to your site at short notice to pick up a load.

Big beasts

Forklift safety was a key theme at the conference, with Peter Harvey, CEO of the FLTA emphasising staff behaviour and company culture as key. He also stressed the importance of sentencing guidelines for companies found guilty of health and safety breaches.

“In some cases, the offence results from cutting corners. So we must ensure the fines are such that any financial benefit gained from cutting corners can’t be realised. It’s about balancing deterrent with proportionality,” he explained.

Marc Paxford, operator training manager for Toyota Material Handling UK added that companies often mis-understood familiarisation training.

“This must occur after basic operator training, and training on a specific piece of equipment. Familiarisation training is about taking operators into the area where they will be working and making them aware of its specific quirks and dangers. This could be a potholed yard, or a low ceiling, for example. Only once this has occurred should you authorise operators to work on your site. People sometimes confuse familiarisation training with training on a specific forklift.”

Heineken UK warehouse area manager, Graham Andrews outlined his company’s efforts to encourage better operator practice.

“The condition of our trucks was disappointing, they were not being used as we’d like.”

The company raised the standard it expected operators to meet and used a number of initiatives achieve this, including an Operator of the Month competition to get worker buy-in, as well as deploying sensors to detect impacts. 

As a result, damage from carelessly driven forklifts fell away dramatically and immediately.

Graham explains: “The operators have been very enthusiastic about the competition and it says something that no one had won the award twice until recently.

“In more general terms, we’ve found that visual aids are very effective in communicating forklift safety messages. Not all forklift operators are as literate as mangers and supervisors may expect.”

In return, Heineken has done its best to make the Toyota forklifts used by the workforce as comfortable as possible, by increasing the specification to include the best seats, safety features etc.

Tim Meese, head of Health & Safety Projects at Alcumus spoke about taking a two-pronged approach to the management of health and safety in the road haulage sector tackling On road risk with defensive driver training and Off road risk (tackling issues such as load security.

He said vans and light goods vehicles are involved in more fatalities than HGVs. This is perhaps pertinent now they are so many vans delivering to homes due to the eCommerce boom.

“You should encourage drivers not to reverse, if possible. It’s something that can’t be eliminated but telematics can be used to pinpoint how often reverse actions are carried out, and if it is excessive, a manager can talk with the driver to discourage that behaviour.”