Achieve and Maintain a Vibrant Safety Culture with a Holistic Approach and Meaningful Training

Safety is an essential part of Crown’s corporate culture. Our own SafeSteps program, which is a peer-to-peer, employee-run effort, has created engagement throughout the organization and produces positive results. It is just one of the reasons why we support our customers with tools not just to encourage forklift safety, but to enable them to strengthen their own safety culture – well beyond National Forklift Safety Day.

A successful safety program should include multiple efforts that encourage forklift safety. In fact, with today’s dynamic and fast-moving warehouses, underscored even more by our current environment, a fragmented approach to safety could actually result in weakening your safety culture.

Instead, what is required is a holistic approach to safety that may be best achieved by working closely with your forklift provider. You should ask your forklift equipment supplier about capabilities, tools and information that enable a more integrated safety program, which include:

• Equipment design that takes an operator-centric approach and prioritizes features that enable safer operation.
• Training that extends beyond forklift operators to include managers, supervisors and other warehouse workers.
• Connectivity that provides more visibility, awareness and opportunities to create and maintain a safe working environment.
• Optimization that is informed by valuable data analytics that can lead to more informed ways of achieving safety improvements.
• Compliance management that controls access and automates processes for streamlining safety adherence.

One component of an integrated approach that should be especially emphasized is engaging employees in a meaningful and consistent way. Sharing the message of “Safety, it’s up to you” across your workforce can help strengthen your safety culture. Regardless of an employee’s role in an organization each person has a responsibility to their family, coworkers and employer to consider safety in their daily decision-making process and do their part to ensure a safe working environment.

Safety training should not only be accessible, but it should also be inclusive. To build and maintain a strong safety culture, training needs to occur at all levels, and no one should be excluded from participation. Organizations that rise above the rest are ones that take a holistic approach to safety training, creating an environment where all employees embrace their role in keeping each other safe and maintain a consistent safety mindset.

By bringing together this type of comprehensive training with safer, more ergonomic forklifts, operator and fleet management software, and safety-focused service programs, an integrated safety management program can drive measurable improvements in key safety metrics and empower individuals to consistently do their part.

For more information on forklift safety and integrated safety management, visit the new Safety and Support display in the Crown Virtual Trade Show, where among other content you can follow the introduction of each of the five chapters of our eBook, “An Integrated Approach to Forklift Safety.”