This isn’t a lecture on hard hat usage.

Are they required in every material handling environment? No.

Should they be? Maybe. It depends on the environment, and current safety measures taken.

What we’re talking about today is more than just, “Wear a hard hat in the warehouse or while operating a forklift.”

It’s about something called Safety Drift.

Hard hats are a great example of safety drift, so that’s what we’ll keep using in this article. Stay with us—this could make a big difference in how your team approaches safety day-by-day.

What is Safety Drift?

Your facility has safety precautions in place. They all do. But if you walk the floor long enough, you’ll see people not following them. Skipping a double-check. Leaving a door open. Not wearing a hard hat.

How did that happen? Because of a pattern.

Say your policy is to require hard hats for all warehouse team members. Someone doesn’t wear theirs on a slow Tuesday. Nothing happens. 

The next week, two other people don’t wear theirs. Still nothing. Six months later, half the floor treats wearing hard hats as a formality, and nobody remembers deciding that. Because nobody did.

That’s Safety Drift—a gradual process of dropping safety precautions because no consequence arises from not following it.

It hits experienced teams hardest. Not despite their experience, but because of it. Time and lack of consequence builds up a sort of confidence.

"Our guys know where the lift traffic is."

"We've never had an incident here."

It’s not bad culture. Nobody’s arguing against policy. They’ve all just recalibrated to a baseline that’s drifted away from what safety used to mean.

The Big Risk: Safety Threats Nobody Expects...Until They Happen

Five seconds. That’s all it takes for one slip, one accident...one brutal consequence of drifting away from safety precautions.

The trouble is, the precautions protect against more than one consequence at a time. Take the hard hat. When people stop wearing them around racks, it’s because they usually picture a box falling off a rack. Secure the boxes, no more problem, no more need for the hard hat.

Except every material handling environment has more safety risks. That hard hat also protects from:

1. Falls. Someone slips and falls on the warehouse floor? On a dock ramp? The hard hat protects from impact when they hit the ground.
    
2. Equipment Impacts. What’s the #1 forklift safety incident? It’s a vehicle tip-over. 42% of incidents are tip-overs. Does a hard-hat protect against injury in a tip-over? Yes!
    
3. Collisions. ‘Forklift-hits-pedestrian’ happens a lot in shared walk zones. Head protection won’t stop the forklift, but it’ll definitely help reduce the injury!
    
4. Electrical Shock. Any time you have exposed wiring, there’s a risk of shock. A hard hat may not offer full protection from a live wire dropping on someone’s head, but it’s certainly better than nothing. 
    
5. Molten Material Splash. A less common, but very real risk for facilities running metal processing, welding, or similar industrial work.

With Safety Drift in effect, all of these become serious threats to everyone. Nobody expects the threat until it happens. Then it’s too late.

How to Correct Safety Drift

Spotting Safety Drift is the first step to correcting it. Nobody’s at fault, so it’s not a matter of instituting public consequences like write-ups.

Instead, use benefits & examples to remind everyone of safety precautions. Continuing with hard hats, here’s how to do that.

Hard Hat Usage Benefits:

• Reduce/eliminate risk of head injuries from falling objects or accidental impacts
• Less downtime and disruption following workplace incidents
• Lower injury-related costs
• Demonstrated commitment to employee safety

Example 1: Visible from the Top Down

All supervisors, shift leads, and visiting managers wear hard hats on the floor. Every time, no exceptions. That way everyone on the team sees it. 

Compliance naturally follows from there. If leadership appears to go along with Safety Drift, it continues. If leadership reinforces safety precautions, so does the team.

Example 2: Reduce Friction

• Pair helmets with hi-visibility vests. One goes on, they both go on. (To help, make sure hard hats and vests are stored in the exact same place.)

• Stock well-fitted, weather-appropriate hard hats at every entry point. Makes it easy to just slap it on.

• Safety inspectors should ask to check operators' hard hats, both to make sure they have them, but to ask the operators if they have any discomfort wearing theirs. If a hat hurts someone's head, they won't wear it!

• Confirm hard-hat wear is covered in all training classes. (Our partner FTS does cover hard hat usage in all of its classes.)

Safety Drift Can Arise from Any Skipped Precaution (Not Just Hard Hats)

No one person causes Safety Drift. It grows gradually among many people over time. 

Stopping it requires a reinforcement of the original safety precautions in place. Anyone can do this, because it’s not a matter of punishing the person responsible. It’s a matter of reasserting the need for keeping teams safe.

Until next month!
-The Forklifts Group Team

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