Today I’m sharing some health and safety tips for warehouses. Health and safety should be a priority for any warehouse. By providing proper training, carrying out inspections, and maintaining proper legal practices you can keep your team happy and safe, and avoid disaster.

I worked in a bubble bath factory and warehouse back when I left school, so I have plenty of first hand experience when it comes to compiling these health and safety tips for warehouses. Most bring in a specialist cleaning company, like ICE Cleaning. These specialist cleaning companies, will provide high-quality warehouse cleaning services to establish a clean and safe environment in your workplace. 

Its qualified technicians can arrive within a matter of hours in an emergency. They will work to create a bespoke plan of action with you as well as provide professional advice.

Read on for a few health and safety tips on how to maintain a clean and safe warehouse.

Frequent Risk Assessments

Risk assessments are a crucial practice to examine what could potentially lead to accidents in any workplace. When it comes to warehouses, you need to ensure you factor in not only machinery malfunctioning, but human error. Someone dropping a box of chemicals can be an expensive mistake. Not only when it comes to replacing them, but also the clean-up, and potential harm to employees. 

Having a proper risk assessment in place is bound to help you develop further policies and procedures, and will contribute to a better health and safety policy in the future. This is one of the most important health and safety tips for warehouses, in my opinion.

Although there is no legal time frame for when you need to carry out risk assessments, it is highly recommended, and good practice to review them at least once a year. You should also have open and honest communication with your employees to identify any hazards that come about in the meantime.

They are your eyes and ears on the “shop floor”, if you will, and often spot potential hazards before office staff will. This is one of the easiest safety tips for warehouses.

Provide Employee Training

If your employees operate heavy machinery and handle dangerous substances, it is imperative that you supply them with proper training. Standard PPE, first aid kits, and spill kits are not enough if your workers don’t know how to use them. 

The presence of employees that are qualified to handle and identify potential incidents should also reduce the number of accidents that occur in the workplace.

To identify what type of training may be needed, you can:

• Establish what skills and knowledge are required for the job
• Review the accidents, near misses, or illnesses reported
• Refer to your previous risk assessment
• See if the law requires training for the role
• Research local training and courses 

Keep the Warehouse Clean

To prevent any accidents such as trips, slips, and falls you will need to maintain a clean warehouse. Communicating with your employees is essential to spot hazards between risk assessment reviews.

There are lots of different ways you can ensure your warehouse stays clean and prevent any potential accidents:

• Make sure everyone is cleaning up after themselves as they work
• Arrange and maintain a cleaning schedule
• Have accessible cleaning supplies
• Reduce waste with recycling procedures and eco-friendly packaging
• Avoid overstocking
• Hire a professional warehouse cleaning service

Services like ICE Cleaning’s specialist warehouse cleaners will ensure you provide a safe, clean work environment for your employees, and meet health and safety regulations. Its’ certified technicians are available 24/7, 365 days a year.

You can find out more about their variety of services here. Finally, let us know in the comments if you have any other health and safety tips for warehouses to share.