4 Tips To Enhance Your Forklift Safety Training Program

Ensure Safety Training Stays A Top Priority

Even when your company emphasizes employee safety, with a long-standing commitment supported by management, forkklift safety can sometimes get overlooked in the fast-paced work environment. To strengthen your forklift safety training, it's important to regularly revisit and enhance your approach. Consider incorporating more hands-on training, refreshing materials to keep them relevant, and scheduling frequent refreshers to keep safety top of mind for all employees. 

Designate Your Company's Safety Team

While forklift safety is everyone's responsibility, designating a specific team to focus on the topic ensures it’s explored in depth. For the team to succeed, internal support is crucial. 

Allocate budget funds for Safety Team initiatives, including train-the-trainer courses to enhance their forklift expertise. Invest in classroom materials tailored to adult learners and encourage the team to leverage federal and local resources, such as OSHA sites and trainings, for continuous learning. Lastly, empower the Safety Team to lead and implement safety changes in the workplace.

Look And Listen For Improvement

To gain a deeper understanding of the work environment, the Safety Team should conduct a workplace audit. This audit involves exploring a typical production day and identifying potential hazards for forklift operators and pedestrians. It includes interviewing employees about equipment or facility challenges, reviewing accident reports to identify trends, conducting a walk-through to spot safety violations or hazards, and observing current forklift operations. These steps will help pinpoint safety concerns and guide improvements.

Highlight Accidents And Near Misses

Forklift accidents and near misses provide valuable opportunities to engage employees and management in safety discussions. By openly sharing the cause of incidents, the Safety Team can help employees understand how to prevent future occurrences, reinforcing that safety protocols exist to ensure everyone gets home safely. The team should also address misconceptions about forklifts, review changes in the work environment that impact operations, translate product damage into financial loss, and request additional budget support to resolve urgent safety concerns.

Awareness Is Ongoing

Writing a forklift safety program is just the beginning; the Safety Team must actively promote safety practices and address potential dangers. Keeping safety top of mind, as supported by OSHA regulations, is essential for ongoing compliance and protection. This involves maintaining up-to-date employee training records, sharing safety tips through various communication channels, recognizing employees for maintaining excellent safety records, and creating a platform for employee feedback and safety suggestions to continually improve practices.

A forklift safety culture does not happen overnight. It takes employee commitment, budget funds, creativity and a passionate Safety Team. By combining knowledge and resources of your internal team and outside sources, a solid program can be built to keep your forklift operators and pedestrians safe.