THERE IS A HELL! - - - IT IS CALLED RETAIL THE WAREHOUSE | Page 6

THE WAREHOUSE
drivers hits something, you hear the alarm and get to run over and say “Gotcha!” Well,
that’s the theory anyway. The reality is that these things go off all the time due to normal
operation of the lift truck. Cracks or expansion joints in the floor, transitions between
portions of the building, loading dock transitions, and debris on the floor (such as a
broken piece of a pallet) can all set the device off. So the warehouse manager constantly
has to run out to turn off the alarms. Eventually, these devices are either shut off or the
sensitivity on the devices is adjusted down to the point where they no longer give false
alarms—unfortunately they no longer trigger on many actually impacts either. It’s actually
kind of funny because these things sell like crazy, but I would guess that most of them are
shut off or adjusted down to a point where they are essentially ineffective within the first
60 days of use.
In recent years I have seen some more sophisticated applications of impact switches that
do things like log the impacts (rather than triggering an alarm) and even log the location
of the impact so that if damage is found, you can go through the logs to track down the
culprit. And while I’m intrigued by these more practical applications of technology, I think
the need for these devices can be pretty much eliminated if you just addressed the unsafe
manner in which these lift trucks are obviously being operated. So rather than being able
to say “Gotcha!” to the person that just caused a bunch of damage, you avoid the damage
in the first place by supervising the workers and taking action when they are observed
driving in an unsafe manner.
And don’t even get me started on the devices designed to prevent unauthorized employee
use of equipment. Uh-oh, too late. Here’s the deal, if you tell your employees they will
lose their job if they use a piece of equipment they are not authorized to use, and you
mean it, and they know you mean it; they will not use the equipment. That’s really all it
takes.

IT DOES NOT TAKE MUCH

My previous statement related to unauthorized use of equipment is one example of this,
but I think this is a point that managers often fail to appreciate. They look at their
operation and workforce and find that almost everyone is doing something wrong. They
are overwhelmed at the thought of having to be constantly monitoring and chasing down
all these workers to correct or discipline them, while at the same time trying to fulfil all
their other responsibilities.
What they fail to understand is how much time they are dedicating to deal with the results
of this lack of control, but more importantly, that they don’t need to be constantly
monitoring and disciplining employees. Everyone is doing something wrong because you
are allowing them to. Once your workforce realizes you are serious about them following
policies and procedures, everything changes. It’s amazing how easy this is to accomplish
and just how fast things change.

CARROTS AND STICKS?

I’ve talked about discipline (the stick), so what about incentives (carrots)? I’m a big
proponent of using incentive programs for productivity and/or accuracy/quality where
workers are rewarded for performing above and beyond the base standard. But you
shouldn’t need to “re ward” workers for simply following the rules. For example, with
safety, I don’t really see how you can have “safer” workers. You have workers that follow
dodie ste®eo p®odu©tion ™

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