The Mheda Journal

Lift truck safety is one of those topics that, no matter how much you cover it, is always relevant, for reasons including (but not limited to) lost productivity, equipment and product damage, employee injury potential, regulatory compliance and customer satisfaction and much more.

That’s one reason why I’m looking forward to working on our 3^rd Quarter issue. Now that the April magazine is being mailed out, I can jump with both feet into the July issue. One of our features in the upcoming issue will be about safety. I sent an e-mail around to the MHEDA-NET safety group, a networking group made up of safety and compliance officers at member companies. I asked them to let me know what safety topics are hot issues in the material handling industry right now. David Hermann of Wisconsin Lift Truck (Brookfield, WI) replied with one of the most interesting responses.

In addition to giving me several topics to consider exploring in our safety issue, including the susceptibility to injury of an aging workforce, lack of qualified training and disdain of seat belt laws, Hermann also had this to say:

“Training is my favorite topic. It allows us to help people appreciate how important they are. Their lives are too important to not invest in wearing a seat belt. Their eyes are too important to not wear safety glasses. Training is a great place to set the stage to help people understand these priorities.”

I found “helping people appreciate how important they are” to be an interesting perspective.  Often when talking to distributors about safety, the talk shifts to lost man hours or lost-dollar prevention or even government funding, which certainly are important aspects, but I have never heard it articulated quite this way. Letting people know how important they are, and the role they play in maximizing the company’s bottom line in respect to those man hours, cash retention and grants, can go a long way toward employee satisfaction.

They say informed employees are happy employees. Ultimately, informed employees are also safe employees, meaning it’s the employer who can reap the benefits.

I’d love to hear any other safety solutions or philosophies out there. Leave me a comment or reply to editor@themhedajournal.org.

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Tags: forklift, material handling

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 3:55 pm and is filed under lift trucks, material handling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.