Briggs Equipment UK Limited will be presenting the results of its latest safety initiative, ‘Safety Gains’, at this year’s National Fork Lift Truck Safety Conference.
Materials handling services specialist Briggs Equipment UK Limited will be presenting the results of its latest safety initiative, ‘Safety Gains’, at this year’s National Fork Lift Truck Safety Conference. Briggs Equipment is once again headline sponsor of the event – the 12th organised by the Fork Lift Truck Association (FLTA) and expected to be the biggest and most ambitious yet – which takes place at Warwick University on September 24.
This year’s conference adopts the theme ‘Is there a killer in your warehouse?’ and Briggs Equipment will examine how a culture of silence, which helps perpetuate dangerous practices and allows safety breaches to go unaddressed, can be the biggest barrier to creating a safe working environment.
Scott McGready, a Senior Safety Health and Environment Quality Advisor at Briggs Equipment, will show how ‘Safety Gains’, which is part of the company’s highly successful BE Safe campaign, has encouraged employees to take responsibility for their own safety and that of their colleagues and help reduce the potential for injury by highlighting hazards, near misses and unsafe conditions.
“We train our engineers well, so they appreciate the dangers associated with their working environment,” says Scott. “However, while some employees would tell us about their safety concerns, others were reluctant to report hazards because they assumed, wrongly, that someone else would do it or thought that by speaking up they might be causing trouble.
“We’ve been able to demonstrate that it is in everyone’s best interests to draw attention to safety issues, so that the company can take action, and that by doing so our engineers are playing an important part in developing best practice.”
The framework for Safety Gains consists of a reporting element and a remediation process. The initiative opened up channels of communication, making it easier for employees to report safety issues, and the company follows through, addressing the problems and then updating staff about the improvements they have helped to bring about via its monthly employee newsletter. As a result Briggs Equipment is not only seeing a significant improvement in hazard reporting, but has also succeeded in encouraging its employees to think proactively about safety, identify opportunities to make improvements and communicate their ideas.
A representative from Briggs Equipment 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.
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