Things to Remember While Handling Industrial Lifting Equipment

It is important to follow the necessary safety tips when you are dealing with different industrial lifting equipment in various lifting operations at your workplace. The lifting gear products and other lifting devices are heavy in weight as they carry bulky loads. It is essential that you should use your equipment correctly so that it will last long and your workplace will be safe enough for you, your employees and accessories .

It becomes an easy go to carry secure lifting practices if you follow below tips to use lifting equipment safely-

• Never exceed the capacity of your product

For safe results, a prescribed load value called Working Load Limit (WLL) has been defined for every device in the lifting environment, exceeding it may lead to negative results. If you load above the WLL, you are putting a device under strain that can result in its irreversible damage and even a fatal injury to the site workers.

It can also cause swing of a load, load damage and destruction to the structures and people around the workplace. It is suggested that you must have a knowledge about weight of the load that has to be lifted so that you can select the best equipment for your task.

• Try to find the center of gravity for the loads

No matter which type of load you are carrying, it is necessary to check its center of gravity. You may have heavy, even or uneven loads, but in all cases the center of gravity allows stopping the load from falling from height to cause an accident. If you want to test the center of gravity of a load, the best practice is to lift it few inches off the ground and then stop. If the load falls, it means there is less harm.

• Use a back up safety method in case primary method fails

There might occur situations when you have accidentally overload your industrial lifting equipment or not finding the right center of gravity of the load. In such cases, you may end up dropping of load from a great height. Load arrestors can result as a good alternative for such scenarios to halt the considerable load and prevent accidents. It is thus always a good habit to connect a load to a load arrestor to avoid any unforeseen circumstances.

In a Nutshell

 The aforementioned factors are of great help in providing assistance to the people so that they can safely handle variety of industrial lifting equipment and myriad of lifting gear products. Read these tips and implement them wisely whenever required.

Author Bio

 Author is an experienced engineer at Bishop Lifting Services who is fond of imparting his creative writing skills among the worldwide passionate people of lifting equipment industry. He shares information about lifting gear products and other industrial lifting equipment.

Understanding the Connection Between Productivity and Safety

Love them or hate them; safety regulations are here to stay. There is mounting evidence to show the connection between worker productivity and safety programs. Safety programs decrease sick leave/pay, and compensation claims. It also increases employee turnover and decreases absenteeism. According to safety experts Dexters, obvious benefit is that employees work their best when healthy, but it also boosts their motivation.

For example, the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment in New Zealand has shown the connection between productivity and safety. The material handling sector has seen productivity increase 85% and a cost-benefit ratio of 1 to 10.

Keeping the work environment safe and healthy increases productivity, reduces sick pay costs and injury costs, and reduces production delays. This generally means more profits and a better level of cooperation between employees and management. Employees feel better about management when they feel that management is looking out for their best interests.

Encourage Safe Behavior

Of course there is a difference between telling employees to be safer, and actually enforcing safety precautions. Sometimes it is inconvenient and time-consuming for employees to follow safety procedures, so it’s important to get employees to stick to the plan while still having managers breathing down their necks about meeting quotas on time. Employees may feel they have to cut corners in order to get everything done on time. Managers should be realistic about their targets to allow for employees to follow proper safety procedures. Safety works on every level.

Managers should try to balance the incentives with the expected outcome, which typically involves boosting productivity while still focusing on safety. There are a few ways to do this, such as gift cards, cash rewards, and employee-of-the-month plaques. Unfortunately employees may be tempted to cover up hazards to meet requirements and get their hands on the rewards. This reduces the peer pressure of having to report incidents and leads to even worse safety standards.

The main way to promote workplace safety programs and encourage employees to follow them is through education. Focus on the benefits of positive employee behavior without focusing on rewards. There are several steps in this education process including training employees. Employee training is the main way to teach employees how to avoid accidents and incidents.

How often an employer educates employees about safety depends on the employer. While training can be done as often or as little as an employer wishes, it’s best to train them at least once each month. When an employee isn’t trained often enough, it leads to complacency. Employees will be extra safe following training, but this quickly fades as they get complacent. If an employee isn’t regularly trained and educated it can lead to accidents.

Conclusion

As you can no doubt see, there is a clear connection to keeping a workplace safe and increasing productivity. Healthy employees are happy employees, and happy employees are productive employees. Safety increases profits by increasing sales and decreasing costs of injury claims. All in all, workplace safety is best for all involved.

Safety Tips when Working at Height

Working at height is responsible for a high proportion of accidents in the workplace and it is imperative that as part of the drive to reduce such accidents that all those who work on MWPs and other such equipment are fully trained on PASMA and IPAF accredited courses. There are a great variety of courses available from many excellent center across the UK that target people who use different machinery or who are involved in working at height at various levels. This is, of course the number one recommendation when advising how to work at height without putting yourself at risk – be properly trained. Let’s take a look at some of the other ways in which employees can work at height more safely.

Assess the working environment before getting started

This should be standard practice, but often the pressures of getting cracking override your common sense and this basic rule is ignored. There are 3 key steps involved in ensuring your working environment for the day is safe.

1. Look around to spot any hazards that relate to falling from height. Are you (or others) using ladders, scaffolding or will you be working on roofs that may be unstable? Is there a risk of items falling from height?

2.  Assess who of your team is most at risk from each hazard and make sure everyone is aware of the potential risks on site, mitigating them where possible.

3. Make sure that there is a regular review of the site and any precautions that were in place before are still adequate.

Eliminate working at height wherever possible

This might sound obvious, but too often accidents happen when working at height when there would have been a safer way to get the job done. The fewer people who are placed in high risk working situations the better.

Never overload or overreach on ladders

A very basic, but essential rule of thumb is that anyone using a ladder should not take up items that will mean they exceed the highest load stated on the ladder. Obviously, this does not mean it is safe to carry heavy weights under the maximum load limit and common sense should be applied. Also, while on ladders your navel should remain inside the stiles and at any given time once you have reached working height you should maintain both feet on the same rung.

Use the right tools for the job

Part of your IPAF training should have taught you how to make sure that you choose the right equipment for each job that involves working at height. The choice between a ladder for instance or scaffolding, mobile access tower or powered access equipment is often dictated by the height you are required to reach. If you conclude that the height is above that safely reached by your ladder or scaffolding then you should rent or suggest the rental of suitable MWPs or other powered access equipment. When the equipment is being chosen, you must ensure that it is stable enough and strong enough to support the weight of whoever will be using it. Any protection around the edge should be strong enough to prevent a fall. Do not start a job with equipment that you strongly feel is inadequate.

Inspect and maintain equipment

All equipment used in working at height should be routinely inspected and maintained appropriately. This includes personal protection equipment such as lanyards and ropes.

This little mini guide to your ideal equipment check system is useful.

(a) Examination – checking for faults, damage, wear and tear or dirt

(b) Testing – make sure your equipment works properly before use

(c) Cleaning –  all equipment works best if kept clean

(d) Repair

(e) Replacement

Innovative Ways to Promote Workplace Diversity and Inclusion

 Promoting workplace diversity and inclusion has become an important focus area for companies, big and small. While the realization to do so occurred only recently, the good news is that a lot is already happening, with companies like Intel pledging $300 million for their diversity-related outcomes by 2020 and Apple earmarking $50 million towards non-profit organizations supporting women in technology.

Why Diversity Matters

For business success in this increasingly interconnected world, embracing diversity in the workplace is the need of the hour. A diverse workplace can help a company attain profitability in new markets, which is becoming a reality because of the many expansions, mergers and acquisitions occurring all over the world. Some other benefits of encouraging inclusion and diversity in the workplace is that the idea, once executed, will breed creative thinking, result in innovative outcomes, and expedite the process of problem solving because of a range of expertise that a diverse talent pool tends to bring in.

Solutions to Foster Diversity and Inclusion at the Workplace

• Counter Any Resistance to Change – Any attempt at organizational change is almost always met with resistance from some quarters, be it acceptance of new ideas or shattering age-old stereotypes around gender, race, religion, color, etc. It is, therefore, important to introduce a diversity training workshop that sensitizes everyone in the organization to the need and importance of having such a diverse workplace.

• Strengthen your Orientation Program  It can be a daunting task for anyone new to settle into an organization where they are not in a majority,  be it because of a skewed sex ratio amongst the employees or because of a language barrier. Your company orientation program must, therefore, look at assigning mentors in such cases. A great example to reinforce this point is a study conducted between 2011 and 2015 by the University of Massachusetts, where it was found that female Engineering undergraduates without mentors felt increasingly anxious, under-confident, and out of the place through the year than girls who were assigned mentors.

• Promote Diversity in Leadership Positions  Remember, good practices must begin at the helm! When talking of leaders, we have always heard about a visionary leader, a dynamic leader, an innovative leader, but very seldom do we hear about a collaborative leader.   So, unless you have a diverse Executive Leadership that understands the real need and benefits of diversity, an all-inclusive and progressive workforce would remain a distant dream.

• Improve Communication  Men in leadership roles have an important role to play, especially when it comes to shattering gender-based stereotypes that prevent the free flow of thoughts and ideas within an organization. They need to become patient and active listeners, and never adopt an authoritarian attitude when it comes to women at their workplace.

• Focus on the Granular Details  Focusing on very small aspects of your organization, especially highly visible ones, can present a lot of improvement areas. Ever thought of providing multilingual safety and warning signs and labels? For instance, experts at Clarion Safety Systems say, Safety labels need to be quickly and easily understood, so people can gain immediate awareness of hazards and avoid accidents and injuries. With increasing diversity in workplaces, you have to take into consideration whether or not your audience reads English. While signs and labels may be a small detail, they can go a long way in reinforcing safety policies due to their high visibility.

• Analytical Insights  Important analytical insights, captured over a period of time, analyzed and implemented, can deliver rich dividends that can help streamline the performance of any business. Big data presents a treasure trove of information and must be explored to assess the quality of past hires, so that any emotional biases during the interview process can be addressed with the help of tangible data.

These are easy to implement solutions that can go a long way in enabling your vision of creating a workplace environment that is diverse and inclusive. This is something that should not be seen as just a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative but a practice that will yield better and more profitable business outcomes going forward.