Improving workplace safety is a daily and universal duty
It has to be faced, our industry has a poor safety record. Transport, postal and warehousing is rated the second most dangerous industry to be working in and records the worst numbers of accidents and fatalities, 54 deaths in 2017 ‒ an increase of 15 per cent on the previous year ‒ and 8,330 serious injuries.
“Anyone working in or around vehicles is most at risk,” says Graham Cooke, Insights Manager at finder.com.au, the organisation which compiled these statistics.
The biggest safety challenges for transport and warehousing operators are training and complacency. I think that you need to go back to why workplace health and safety became such a big issue in the first place, which was because businesses didn’t operate safely. As a result, a lot of workplaces have documented safety procedures and manuals but unless they are believed in and acted on by the people in the business they’re little more than tick and flick exercises.
It really comes down to each and every person having to be responsible for their own safety, and a workplace safety culture needs to work at that level rather than the big stick threat of an operation being fined or the principal going to jail. Each person in the business has to commit to taking care of themselves and other people, for themselves and their families and other people’s families.
Vehicles and machines are much safer now than they used to be and for people to hurt themselves they have to be breaching the policies of the business or not have training appropriate to what they are responsible for. It might seem surprising that the finder.com analysis also found the highest number of deaths were workers in the 55 to 64 age group, but one of the reasons why older people are over-represented in the statistics is because they have often been in the job for so long that they become complacent and ignore the safety protocol or take shortcuts. Familiarity breeds contempt.
Systems and training help to make sure that people know what they should be doing. Over and above this, safety culture has to come from the top down. The person in charge needs to walk the walk in everyday practice. It’s no use having an audit and everyone thinks about it for a day or a week and goes back to what they were doing and the way they were doing it. It can’t be a focus once a year, it has to be all the time.
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Instilling workplace safety culture means having conversations about safety awareness on an ongoing basis. It has to occur consistently to reinforce how every person is responsible.
In the warehousing context daily staff toolbox talks that are a quick five minute summary of the issue of the day can help to reinforce safe practices. Forklifts are dangerous vehicles and there is a high incidence of accidents where they are involved. They are heavy, operated in confined spaces and tip very easily if they’re not carrying the load correctly. People don’t consider forklift driving to be highly skilled but it needs to be taken more seriously. It’s obvious that only licensed operators should use them, but further to just having licensed operators, ensuring new operators are closely supervised and given additional training from experienced operators should be standard practice.
This goes for trucks also. Just having a licence doesn’t create a safe workplace, it’s the subsequent training that provides the additional awareness. In-cab safety system technology can now provide the tools: monitoring, messaging and checklists they need to complete when they sign on before they can start the truck, and ongoing oversights by management during the journey. This can help identify issues that can be addressed with additional training where required.
These systems require an initial outlay, but anything that saves one heavy vehicle accident is profit for the year. The money it represents each week is an investment, not a cost because if you have a truck accident you could put a contractor at risk of injury or death, or an employee, you’ve burned your insurance policy and you may have to foot clean-up costs or deal with freight issues – there are so many consequences involved. It becomes even worse if the accident is newsworthy, there can be long-term consequences for your business.
In addition to general occupational health and safety regulations, transport and logistics operators should also be aware of state-specific workplace requirements and ensure that all are observed in company protocols, and that they remind their staff about them consistently as part of the working day. That way we all get to go home safely.
Roz Shaw is Head of Transport at international insurance broker Gallagher, and the former CEO of Hawkins Road Transport Pty Ltd.