Warehouse HSE Procedure and Practices

Session 1 - An introduction to your health & safety obligations

• An Overview of the Health & Safety At Work Act 2015
• Due diligence, the duty of care & an overview of responsibilities
• Who is responsible for safety and why?
• Your warehouse’s safety responsibilities and interacting with external third parties, contractors, and others on site
• Managing visitors and temp workers
• Worker participation methods
• Planning cascades of responsibility throughout managers, supervisors, and workers

• Ensuring you are planning safety to become integrated & aligned with wider organizational safety
• Working with the ELT to plan your safety, processes & responsibilities

• How the best policies & procedures can be undone by poor or inconsistent compliance
• Dangling the carrot instead of wielding the stick – incentivizing safety culture & practice
• Which are the hardest things to seem to get compliance with?
• What is your organization’s safety strategy & culture?
• Relevant health and safety policies – e.g. “Health and Safety Policy”, Drugs and Alcohol, Stress and Fatigue, Harassment

• Assessing location & accessibility factors of warehouses
• Inwards & outwards goods
• Picking & assembly points
• Dispatch
• Areas of interaction with external parties, eg transport operators
• Picking from height
• Machinery, vehicles
• Automation lines & equipment & new autonomous equipment like pickers

• Traffic management – people and vehicles
• Processes and options for effective H&S management of visitors, contractors, truck drivers, and temp workers

• Manual handling
• Working with automation & equipment
• Effective operator training
• First-aid provision & training
• Floods, slips & trips
• Personal protective equipment
• Health assessments
• Hazardous Substances
• Evacuation planning
• Creation and management of standard operating procedures and training

• Machine Guarding  
• Good equipment maintenance practices
• Best practice forklift truck health & safety operations; including height management
• Maintenance & care of equipment
• Electrical safety
• Ensuring the warehouse team is fully equipped with safety gear and its use is enforced

• Understanding the significant impact that fatigue, shiftwork & rosters can have on safety practice and rule-following
• How much can fatigue be minimized in a shiftwork/rostering environment?
• Understanding & educating on sleep patterns
• Rostering to counter fatigue – types of rosters
• Fatigue & machinery operation

Session 9 - Warehouse hazard and risk assessment/management Health, wellbeing & stress in the workplace

• What are your responsibilities with regards to stress, and worker wellbeing?
• Figuring out what is a “work issue” vs “home life”
• Are there wider business issues in your organization that are creating worker stress or putting well-being at risk?

• What does an effective incident investigation look like?
• Who is appropriate to investigate?
• Keeping management informed of progress
• Processes, documentation & tools available for effective reporting

• Applying the standard health & safety audit to include workplace hazards specific to your organization
• Audit Template provided