5 Tips For How To Improve Factory Floor Safety

Improving factory safety is essential. Here are five tips:

1. Training: Ensure all staff understand safety procedures.
2. Signage: Use clear signs to highlight hazards.
3. Regular Risk Assessment: Conduct frequent assessments to prevent complacency.
4. Floor Marking Maintenance: Check and maintain floor markings regularly.
5. Learn from Near Misses: Analyze near misses and take preventive action.

Health and safety in any workplace is important, but warehouses and factories can be particularly hazardous if sensible precautions are not taken and enforced.

No matter how good your health and safety record, you should never rest on your laurels, so the team here at Northern Marking has come up with five ideas for improving factory floor safety.

Training

Rigorous health and safety procedures are no good if half your staff aren’t aware of them.

Anyone likely to be spending any time on the factory floor needs to be trained in what the different signs and floor markings mean, which areas of the factory contain potential hazards and what they should do if they spot anything likely to pose a risk to other workers.

Additionally, if any changes are made to agreed procedures, everyone should be brought up to date at the earliest opportunity.

And if anyone is absent on that day, don’t forget about them, bring them up to speed as soon as they are back.

Signage

Along with line markings, clear signage is one of the most straightforward ways of making people aware of potential hazards in the workplace.

It’s easy to become so focused when you’re busy that you lose track of where you are and what you should be looking out for.

Well placed and brightly coloured signage will catch people’s attention and help them stay safe no matter how distracted they become.

Regular risk assessments for factory floors

It’s often said that familiarity breeds contempt, but when it comes to health and safety in the workplace, familiarity is more likely to breed complacency.

It’s important that you have a dedicated team with responsibility for regular checks around the factory, but it’s always worth getting another point of view. A fresh pair of eyes with extensive experience in different workplaces will probably spot things your regular team just aren’t seeing.

Make time for regular checks of existing floor marking

Floor markings are an essential part of health and safety procedures, but over time they can get worn down by forklift trucks, trolleys, pump trucks and safety boots.

You can train new members of staff all you like, but if they can’t actually see what they’re supposed to be looking out for, then it’s not going to do them much good.

As part of your regular factory H&S procedure, make sure you’re checking all existing floor markings and renewing them if you have any doubts about their effectiveness.

Use every near miss as a chance to improve

Every workplace will have ‘near misses’ – when an accident is narrowly avoided – and these should be treated exactly the same as an actual accident.

Analyse what led to that near miss occurring and see if anything can be done to prevent it happening again. Because of course next time it may become that actual accident.

Northern Marking is based in Manchester, but provides services to clients in the following areas; Huddersfield, Blackburn, Rochdale, Preston and beyond. Northern Marking is a leading road marking company, providing the following services; line marking, school & playground markings, warehouse markings, electric car parking space marking, line removal, white lining and car park markings.

If you want to improve safety in your warehouse or on your factory floor, you can trust Northern Marking to come up with the perfect line marking system.

Our experienced team will work with you to make sure you get the solution that works for your business and keeps your colleagues safe. Contact us today for more information.