How often do you worry about being struck by lightning?
The U.S. experiences around 37 million lightning strikes every year. Very few of those injure people. Even in Florida, the lightning capital of America, only 2,000 lightning injuries have been recorded in the last 50 years. In fact, the odds of being struck by lightning are less than one in a million. Consequently, most people don’t worry about it unless they play golf in a thunderstorm. That’s not a joke. Two-thirds of lightning deaths occur during outdoor leisure activities like golf. Yet, the infrequency of those deaths blunts that statistic to a punch line.
Warehouse safety can suffer from similar complacency.
According to the National Safety Council, 84 people died in forklift accidents in the U.S. between 2024 and 2025. If you’re reading that number and thinking it sounds small, your associates are too. About 1.85 million people work in warehouses all across America. That means a warehouse worker’s odds of dying in a forklift accident are around 0.004%. That sounds insignificant to the average worker until it happens to them.
Infrequency breeds complacency, and warehouse safety complacency is deadly.
Read on to learn how daily safety inspections save lives and how to get your staff to take them seriously.
Your forklifts, loading dock equipment, and pallet racks will all tell you what’s wrong if you listen.
Daily inspections are how you listen. You can’t fix problems you don’t know about. So a thorough, daily inspection is the best way to discover what ails your equipment. Equipment failures rarely happen spontaneously. Small issues, such as leaks and dents, accumulate unnoticed until they cause a failure. When that failure happens, it's too late to prevent an accident.
Daily inspections ensure minor issues don’t go unnoticed. Without them, accidents are inevitable.
OSHA requires daily forklift inspections.
Forklifts get a lot of use and abuse. Consequently, minor damage can accumulate quickly. Pre-shift inspections help you stay ahead of an accident. A thorough pre-shift inspection covers the whole forklift, including mast chains, forks, and tires. For electric forklifts, the inspection should include the battery too.
Use a forklift pre-shift inspection checklist to ensure your operators check everything every time.
Loading docks are one of the most dangerous places in your warehouse.
Yet, they are also one of the most neglected. Dock doors, dock levelers, and dock locks are just some of the safety equipment that require daily inspection. Like forklifts, your docks take a lot of punishment. They are the intersection of forklifts and trailers, which puts them at increased risk of damage. Meanwhile, loading dock activity also increases the risk of slips, trips, and falls.
That combination of hazards makes a loading dock inspection checklist vital.
Pallet racks require monthly inspection, but weekly is better.
Like loading docks, racks frequently interact with forklifts. This dramatically increases the risk of collisions. Even minor dents threaten a rack’s structural integrity. Without repair, damaged uprights can buckle beneath normal loads. The resulting collapse can spell disaster for your warehouse.
Weekly inspections discover damage faster.
However, you don’t need to inspect all your racking at once. Instead, divide it up into sections and have your associates complete a section per day. For example, you might have staff inspect 20% of your racking on Monday, the next 20% on Tuesday, and so on. By Friday, your team will have inspected all your racking, and you’ll know which repairs to make.
There’s one problem inspections alone can’t solve: the hit nobody reports.
Most rack damage comes from a forklift. A driver clips an upright, feels nothing, and keeps working. Sometimes they don’t report it because the operator doesn’t want to get in trouble. Just as often, the bump honestly looked harmless. Either way, that damage now sits there, weakening under load, until someone finds it days later, if they find it at all.
That’s the danger of an unattributed rack strike. The rack never gets inspected because nobody knew it was hit.
Weekly inspections shrink that window. Impact detection closes it. The moment a truck strikes something, the system flags it, so you can check that bay before the next load goes up.
With pallet rack safety, a little vigilance can prevent serious injuries.
People prioritize what they value.
Building a culture of safety isn’t about getting your associates to value safety. The trick is teaching them the value of all the little steps that improve safety. When your staff appreciates the benefits of daily inspections, they’ll take them seriously.
Use these techniques to teach your associates how daily inspections benefit them.
Personal well-being is a powerful motivator.
Safety as a concept can be abstract. Make it real by discussing real-life consequences. Get specific, use real-world examples, and don’t shy away from the discomfort of visualizing the grim outcomes. Sugar-coating your examples makes them less relatable. Instead, discuss the reality of warehouse accidents, including the injuries themselves and how they affect quality of life.
That said, don’t go overboard.
The goal is to get workers to take safety seriously, not scare them away from their jobs. Keep safety talks short and to the point. Cover the gory details, but don’t dwell on them. Be sure to explain how inspections prevent accidents in specific terms that are relevant to each example.
The goal is a healthy dose of fear paired with actionable prevention.
Safety talks are powerful tools, but they won’t reach everyone.
Fear is uncomfortable. Some workers will reject the evidence in your safety talks to avoid feeling that discomfort. They’ll rationalize that the odds are so low, it could never happen to them. Those associates have to see it to believe it. By then, it’s too late.
To reach them, turn compliance into opportunity.
Creative incentive programs are an excellent tool. Incentives reinforce best practices by rewarding those who adopt them. For example, supervisors could carry vouchers or small gift cards. When they spot an operator doing a proper pre-shift inspection, the supervisor rewards the operator on the spot.
There are many ways to tackle incentive programs, but they all work the same. They offer instant gratification for good habits. This teaches the brain to associate compliance with positive outcomes.
The shorter the gap between good behavior and reward, the stronger the association.
Your telematics systems can also help.
Some systems include daily inspection protocols. These systems prevent forklift operation until the daily checklist is complete. These lockouts help enforce compliance by offering active reminders to your operators. With these, an operator can’t simply forget an inspection. However, they can skip one by lying to the system.
Consequently, this tool is best used in tandem with others.
Now, almost all new Toyota forklifts come with built-in telematics. It’s called MyInsights.
The free version detects impacts. So when a truck hits a rack, the system logs it, even if nobody reports it.
Upgrade your subscription, and MyInsights can run the daily pre-shift inspection on a screen right on the truck. The forklift won’t move until the checklist is complete, and every inspection is saved automatically for your records.
Can an operator still rush through it? Sure. But the impact sensor is the backstop. It catches the damage even when the checklist doesn’t.
It won’t build your safety culture for you. It just makes the daily habit much harder to skip. Ask your SST Solutions Team what your fleet already has turned on.
Crowdsourcing is an often-overlooked compliance technique.
Yet, it’s one of the easiest. Ask your associates for ideas. Asking questions like these can reveal critical insights:
Engage your associates with an open, curious mind. Their answers may surprise you, but will give you a window into how they view warehouse safety. Then, incorporate their answers into your solutions. Your associates are more likely to adopt protocols they helped design.
Don’t wait for all your other initiatives to fail. Get your staff involved early to promote buy-in.
A helmet can’t protect a head if it’s never worn.
That’s why we don’t just sell safety products. We help you use them. Our Solutions Team has the experience and training to help you build a culture of safety throughout your facility.
Our techniques stem from the human-centered design principles of Toyota Lean Management (TLM). TLM is an industry-leading methodology for continual improvement. While typically associated with optimization, its strategies apply to safety as well. Consequently, you can count on us to help improve compliance and reduce accidents without busting your budget.
Contact us online or visit one of our locations to learn more about improving warehouse safety:
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