We know how physically demanding the nature of the job of forklift operators. It is inevitable for them not to get sleepy or drowsy after prolong hours of work while on the truck.
With more and more cargos to move in and around of the warehouse, the more the workers become tired and fatigued. And what significantly contributes to this is the night shift.
If you’re an employer, you might get a bit concerned if sleepiness is a safety hazard. After all that we want are productive workers and an accident-free workplace.
Loss of sleep causes workers not to pay attention, makes them less alert and slows reaction time – you know what does that means - an accident. We can conclude that sleepiness is a safety hazard because coming to work with poor or lack of sleep impairs the workers to make a crucial decision that is enough reason to hit someone with a forklift.
In addition, it has been proven in the past studies, see below, that sleep loss or inadequate sleep of workers on the job will cause inattentiveness. Workers who are working for a long shift without a good rest and experiencing intense sleepiness are significantly prone to repeated mistakes that can lead to accidents.
If you’re an employer who is concerned about this, you may want to act now before something happens. Below are some of the ways you can do to mitigate risks and hazards associated with this issue.
Ways Employers Can Do To Mitigate the Risks
- Promote workers’ safety training – you, the management, should back workers’ safety training to promote awareness and education. Everything will be futile if there’s no management support. What you can do is to allocate finances for the workers’ education on safety. Safety training if given is a great tool to reduce risks at the workplace. The recommended way to conduct safety training is by conducting it onsite so that workers’ bad behavior can be addressed to correct it. Not only the workers will benefit from safety training, but at the end of the day, you, the employer will reap its fruit from it as well.
- Establish regular safety audit and inspections to determine areas to improve in the workplace. If you are going to do this, make sure that concerned personnel is involved - those who are in the management, and safety (officers and manager), and a representative from workers and perhaps human resource should comprise the audit and inspection team. Auditing and reviewing can give an important insight to determine where the problem areas occur to correct the issue in the soonest possible time.
- Conduct a risk assessment – Conducting a risk assessment is another way of mitigating the risk associated with sleepiness. Doing so will enable to determine those workers who are more likely to experience sleepiness while on the job. If you think those who are on the night shift and those who are working extended periods of time are the ones who are prone to sleepiness, that’s just half of the story and doing risk assessment will identify those other workers. Workers and business owners should work together to take action against the hazards associated with sleepiness.
- Regularly conduct safety toolbox talk to stress the hazards related to lack or poor sleep. Conducting toolbox talk is a good way to communicate concerns to workers. This activity is done before every shift. The workplace’s safety officer is the one in charge of communicating to workers about this issue. What I like about the toolbox talk is that a certain topic can be highlighted to focus on the high-risk scenarios, one such example is the risks related to poor or lack of sleep while working.
- Maintain accident records – over the years that I’ve been working in the safety, I’ve seen numerous accidents, near-misses, property and equipment damages, injuries, workplace vehicle accidents, and I have cabinets full of records that I maintain so that accidents like those can easily be tracked or recorded. Aside from the hardcopy file, I also maintained softcopy on the computer. One of the benefits of maintaining records is that accidents/incidents can be monitored to identify the real cause to prevent them from happening again.
- Give operators a good break – Since laws related vary from state to state or country to country, there’s definitely a particular law that standardizes duration and frequency of breaks, you must comply with the law in your state or country. It is up to the employer’s discretion to give the workers more breaks than what is stipulated in the law.
- Discipline workers by issuing them a memo - Will Issuance of the memo a good solution to discipline workers caught sleeping? I had been writing a memo for the span of 2 years when I was working in Saudi Arabia as a safety officer back in 2016. Do you know what I found?
Issuance of a memo to discipline workers who caught violating policy such as sleeping while at work is a good way to communicate about his or her violation and make them realize their mistake. But the issuance of memo becomes ineffective when there’s no stringent punishment to give to policy violators. If you are going to discipline them, make sure to be tough from the beginning.
Sleepiness is Caused by Fatigue, There Isn’t One Answer to Reduce It
Again, there’s no definite solution to reduce the fatigue of workers but you can start in the workplace. Things like too much noise in the workplace, poor lighting in the place the operators are working in, even the intense vibration the truck creates while in operation, or even the operators physically exerting their bodies are some of the causes of workplace fatigue.
The employer should look into what causes the operators to get fatigued and this is what communicating to workers come into play. The employer should talk to the workers to make them aware of fatigue and the workers should honestly tell the employer the issues they’re facing to distinguish what issue is affecting the workers the most.
If the cause is a personal problem of the workers, then there’s not much the employer can do. But the provision of safety training and conducting toolbox talk highlighting the dangers of sleepiness can somehow help the workers to boost their morale.
To Make a Conclusion
Operating a forklift is basically the same as driving a car, it requires heightened alertness on the obstacles and what’s going on in the workplace, and a sharp focus on the obstacles in the way.
If your operators are going to drive forklifts, make sure that they’re in a good state of awareness and not having fatigue or sleepiness as it lowers alertness leading to a bad decision.
Sleepiness is a safety hazard that must be given due importance. Employers must keep an eye out for overly tired workers as they are more prone to commit mistakes.
It the employer’s obligation to keep the workplace safe and one of the ways to keep it that way is to monitor the forklift operators of their bad behavior.
