It’s not so much the individual act that’s the risk. It’s the scale. When you move millions of dollars in product daily, you have abundant opportunity for injury.

What are some of the most commonly overlooked safety risks in any warehouse?

Read on to find out:

1. Forklift

Did you know that forklifts lead to 100 deaths and 95,000 injuries to their operators or coworkers yearly?

The data comes straight from OSHA.

Those statistics sound almost unbelievable, given that 145,000 people work in American warehouses.

So if you count that as one injury per person, it’s possible that more warehouse workers get injured by a forklift in a given year than those who don’t.

OSHA states that unsafe forklift use and improper stacking of product are the leading causes of injuries by forklifts.

So those represent your biggest opportunities to reduce forklift injuries.

2. Set Reasonable Time Requirements for Task Completion

More is better…or is it?

That thinking permeates every business. However, the way you get more can be deceptive.

Businesses who put stringent demand on their warehouse workers end up with burned out workers, more mistakes, and lower productivity.

Setting reasonable requirements so employees can go at a comfortable pace results in fewer safety risks.

What if you can’t get enough out of a particular worker even at a comfortable pace?

Find a different position for them. You went through the hard work of hiring a quality employee, so keep them on the team and find a spot for them where they can thrive.

3. Create the Right Incentive-Based Safety Program

It’s easy to make incentives. The hard part is finding an incentive that’s difficult to achieve, but also not impossible.

If it’s too difficult, employees give up and leave. If it’s impossible, employees also give up and leave.

Make sure you don’t compromise one result for another. For example, incentivize both quality and speed with your incentive.

The incentive must also be measurable. And everyone in every department of your company should be incentivized.

If you have created a fair system, high-performing employees should consistently earn the incentive.

Middle-performing employees should substantially improve their performance, as they also represent your biggest opportunity for gains.

And even though low-tier employees may not earn your incentives, they at least understand the reason for your criticism of their performance. And you have a basis for replacing them with better quality hires in the future.

This will even prevent you from having to create and audit policy because employees will be motivated to stay safe on their own.

Now that you know these overlooked safety risks, you can keep your workplace safer with far greater ease than ever before.