Warehouse Safety Demands a Culture of Safety

81% of American drivers know running a red light is extremely dangerous, but 27% do it anyway, according to a 2023 AAA survey.

In fact, traffic studies across multiple states found that a driver runs a red light once every 20 minutes at most busy intersections. In 2023, those traffic violations alone caused 1,086 deaths and over 135,000 injuries. This data illuminates one universal truth:

Knowing what’s right and doing what’s right are not the same.

Like traffic lights, many warehouse safety protocols rely exclusively on worker compliance. Your associates know what’s safe and what isn’t. Yet, they’re human. External pressures can lead them astray. Ambitious quotas, social pressures, and fear of retribution all influence how your operators rank safety among their other priorities.

Your team members will make safety their top priority only if your internal culture does, too.

Read on to learn how to create or destroy a culture of safety.

Sabotage Warehouse Safety in 4 Easy Steps

Your warehouse’s culture will make or break your safety record.

Fear, warped priorities, and hollow gestures are all tried-and-true methods of sabotaging your own best efforts. Here are four traits that are toxic to warehouse safety:

1. Snitches Get Stitches

Tattle-tales. Rats. Snitches. English is full of colorful terms for the Guy Who Told The Boss.

Everyone fears the ramifications of being that guy. Therefore, the first step to sabotaging warehouse safety is to focus on consequences. Harsh punishments for even minor incidents reduce reporting, not actual accidents.

No one on your team wants to be the guy who reported an incident and got someone else fired.

Your associates know what it means to lose a job. If they think an incident will put themselves or someone else closer to unemployment, they’ll avoid reporting whenever possible. To them, there’s no upside to making a report. Someone is going to get punished.

So until the risk of staying quiet outweighs the risk of speaking up, they won’t say a word.

2. Only Track Sound Bite Metrics

Hanging a banner that proudly claims triple-digit days without an incident fills hearts with pride.

Plus, it’s the perfect sound bite to headline safety reports bound for upper management. However, that number doesn’t actually reflect days without an incident. It reflects the number of days without a reported incident. Still, that number starts to define your team.

When it becomes your team’s identity, that number is what your team protects.

Metrics like these are functionally meaningless. They don’t actually reflect genuine safety improvements. Instead of relying on fear to reduce reporting, they use incentives to get workers to under-report incidents. They create unspoken peer pressure to keep whistleblowers silent and maintain the illusion of safety.

No one wants to be the guy who made the team look bad. So no one speaks up until it’s too late.

3. Race to the Finish Line

If you’ve ever heard of scuba diving, you’ve probably heard of the dreaded bends.

In the early days of commercial diving, workers would head straight to the surface no matter how long they spent at depth. Without decompression stops, painful gas bubbles formed in workers’ joints. The afflicted contorted themselves in an attempt to alleviate the pain. These contortions earned the bends their name.

The bends took a significant toll on the workforce, creating massive turnover by crippling some divers while others left for safer jobs. Speed was the priority in those early days. Racing to the finish chewed up workers and, ironically, delayed projects due to labor shortages.

Likewise, prioritizing speed over safety is a great way to achieve neither.

Time pressure leads workers to look for shortcuts, such as climbing a rack instead of using a ladder. Yet, all shortcuts are a gamble. They are only faster if that gamble pays off. If a shortcut works enough times, confirmation bias leads workers to believe it’s safe. It becomes routine, but eventually, the worst happens. When it does, everything comes to a grinding halt.

While you might be tempted to sprint, a steady pace wins the race.

Let’s take pallet rack safety as an example. Pressed pickers might arrive at a SKU, realize the nearest ladder is three aisles over, and weigh their options. They could go get the ladder or climb the rack. If they get the ladder, the pick will take more time, but there’s minimal risk. If they climb, they might save time, but they might also have a nasty fall.

Their choice will depend on which performance metric matters the most in their next employee review.

4. Every Worker for Themselves

If you really want to crush your staff’s spirit, put up warning signs and call them prevention.

Messages like “chock your tires” dump the burden of safety on the individual. Signs can’t back up your team or enforce compliance. They do nothing to actually support associates. Without backing, a warning sign is at best a hollow reminder. At worst, your staff sees it as a way to preemptively blame victims for warehouse accidents.

At one time, signs and floor markings might have been the best option. Now, they highlight the presence or absence of other safety solutions.

A sign alone signals to your staff that they are on their own.

How To Create a Culture of Safety

Nurturing a safety culture isn’t difficult, but there’s more to it than just avoiding a toxic culture.

In addition to eliminating the self-sabotage habits above, use these four techniques to cultivate a safety-focused team.

1. Make the Invisible Visible

Don’t keep safety metrics a secret.

Humans normalize what they encounter every day. Daily dangers fade into the background, encountered but unobserved. If you want to improve safety, you have to make hazards visible. That means establishing safety baselines, implementing improvement plans, and tracking improvement metrics.

Moreover, you must share all of that information with your team.

If safety hazards and improvements are invisible to your associates, they’ll have no concept of progress. They’ll never know if updated procedures actually make them safer or just complicate things. Pulling back the curtain lets them see how their actions make a difference.

Remember that the metrics you choose to track matter. Static metrics, like days without an incident, don’t track improvement. They reinforce the status quo. Dynamic metrics, such as the number of repaired uprights, indicate active solutions.

These insights remind your team members that their commitment to safety drives change.

2. Build a System of Tangible Support

The Marines have a saying: One is none.

It means that when you trust mission success to one person or piece of gear without any backup, you’ve already failed. If safety falls entirely on each individual’s shoulders, you’re only as safe as your most distracted associate.

Instead, focus on systemic improvements.

No matter how diligent, every worker will make mistakes. Engineering controls help catch those mistakes before they become accidents. Engineering controls are more than simple reminders. They are mechanical solutions that interact with their environment to support worker safety. There are literally thousands of options available, covering every part of your warehouse. Let’s look at the loading dock for an example.

OSHA’s loading dock safety standards require that all trailers be secured before loading and unloading.

Wheel chocks meet that standard, but they rely on the memories of busy, fatigued workers. Dock locks with integrated signaling systems automatically secure trailers to the dock and indicate when it is safe to enter. The loading dock team still needs to check the dock locks, but they have an automated system backing them up.

Investing in warehouse safety systems helps your staff do the right thing every time.

3. Celebrate the Whistleblowers

Choose praise over punishment.

You can’t fix safety issues that you don’t know about. To encourage reporting, celebrate associates who find potential safety hazards and publicly praise team members for these reports.

When an associate’s actions require correction, focus on empowerment.

Approach mistakes as an opportunity to learn and improve. Make punishment a last resort. This approach reminds your team that they aren’t risking a friend’s job by reporting an incident. They’re actually helping their coworkers keep their roles by providing them opportunities to improve.

Remember, most workplace errors aren’t malicious; they’re just misguided.

4. Communicate with Relentless Compassion

New safety equipment and procedures should never be a surprise.

Involve your team in safety improvements from the very beginning. Seek team member input at every level of the process. Ask for ideas, feedback, concerns, and questions. Avoid assigning blame for past lapses; instead, focus on systemic improvements to better support your team.

Make a sincere effort to understand the various points of view presented.

Ideally, your associates should walk away feeling like they are part of the solution, not the problem. Maybe you called a meeting to discuss forklift operators failing to wear their seatbelts. You had a problem with this before, so you upgraded to orange seatbelts. The bright color helped most operators remember to buckle up, but one operator, Steve, still frequently forgets.

You could assume Steve is lazy and seek out solutions from the rest of the team. The other team members consider the problem solved. So, they provide suggestions of little value.

Alternatively, you could make an earnest effort to involve Steve in the solution and, in doing so, discover he’s colorblind. The bright orange doesn’t help him because he can’t see it. By taking Steve’s input, you’ve made him feel valued and solved a problem that would have popped up for any colorblind associate in the future.

Not every worker will provide groundbreaking insight, but you risk missing crucial information by cutting anyone out of the process.

Warehouse Safety Tips From the Source

We’ve had an eye on warehouse safety for over a century.

In that time, we’ve seen every tip, trick, tool, and technique the industry has to offer. We stored lessons from the past and helped forge new solutions for the future. When it comes to warehouse safety, that’s what sets us apart. Our experts live at the intersection of established reliability and innovation, drawing the best from both worlds to keep your staff and facility safe.

To learn more about warehouse safety or schedule a safety consultation, contact us online or visit one of our locations:

Arkansas - Jonesboro
Alabama - Birmingham, Dothan, Irondale, Madison, Mobile, and Montgomery
Georgia - Atlanta
Mississippi - Belden, Tupelo, and Richland
Tennessee - Jackson, Memphis, Knoxville, and Kingsport

Further Reading
OSHA Forklift Pedestrian Safety 101: Enhance Safety Around Forklifts
Pallet Rack Safety: Protect Your Employees and Investment
Lights, Camera, Safety: Five Forklift Safety Accessories Your Team Can’t Live Without