Materials handling services specialist Briggs Equipment is to headline sponsor the 12th National Fork Lift Truck Safety Conference, organised by the Fork Lift Truck Association (FLTA). The company will also discuss its latest safety initiative during the event, which takes place at Warwick University on September 24th.
‘Is there a killer in your warehouse?’ is the theme of this year’s conference, which will address how efforts to create a safe working environment can be torpedoed by a culture of silence as it helps perpetuate dangerous practices and allows safety breaches to be ignored.
Briggs will highlight how the ‘Safety Gains’ initiative, which is part of the company’s BE Safe campaign, has encouraged employees to take responsibility for safety and help reduce the potential for injury to themselves and their colleagues.
The initiative has helped to open up channels of communication, making it easier for employees to notify line managers and the health and safety team about hazards, near misses and unsafe conditions. Meanwhile, the company is not only responding by taking decisive action, but is also updating employees about the improvements they have helped to bring about via its monthly newsletter.
“Our engineers appreciate the dangers associated with their working environment, but while many were happy to tell us if they were concerned about safety issues, others were reluctant to do so. They assumed, quite wrongly, that someone else would do it or thought that by speaking up they might be causing trouble,” said Scott McGready, a senior safety health and environment quality advisor at Briggs Equipment.
“Through ‘Safety Gains’ we’ve been able to refocus attention on safety and show that it’s in everyone’s best interests to report hazards so that the company can take action. Importantly, the initiative is encouraging employees to think proactively about safety, identify opportunities to make improvements and then communicate their idea, enabling them to have a major input into developing best practice.”
A representative from Briggs is also joining the FLTA Safety Conference’s Practical Safety Panel – comprising legal, technical and insurance experts plus specialist representatives from the HSE and the TUC – to answer delegates’ questions in an open forum debate.
