There are a range of important steps in lift truck training which pertain particularly to lift truck safety. For starters, it is very essential to make certain that all employees have been correctly taught and certified to utilize the equipment. This is a big piece of machinery that we are talking about. You simply cannot take risks with it. Lift truck training is vital business which must be taken seriously. If you choose to skip this process, extreme repercussions could eventually catch up with you. Allowing inexperienced and wrongly taught people to operate lift trucks can lead to very bad injuries, severe damage and also fatality.
Make it a standard company policy to always use seatbelts, at all times, no matter what. This is an easy topic that workers normally become lax about, specially because the machinery is just traveling 10 miles an hour. Workers usually assume that they will not have any kind of problem and therefore, begin not wearing them. This is where the danger could occur, since it is easy for an accident to take place which could have damaging outcome. This is not a car or a truck; the seatbelt is not required to hold them in the cab if they run into something. In a lift truck, the purpose is much more important, even though the machine travels very slow, in the unfortunate event of a tip-over, the seatbelt holds the operator in place secure in the driver's seat so they will not tumble out and be accidentally crushed beneath.
A well-organized reporting system needs to be implemented in case of any mechanical problems or issues occurring. Employees need a rational way to communicate these situations so that those who are responsible for fixing them will. Workers have to know enough about the machinery that they understand at least the essentials of what can go wrong.
A driver needs to be able to detect if there is a problem with the lift truck so as to fix it before it becomes a big and potentially risky or costly problem. Having a dependable reporting system in place is very important for workplaces that run on shift work. For instance, if one operator is having a problem and he leaves, and the next operator is unaware of the issue during his shift, then terrible situations could happen. Forklift training is a lot more involved than just learning just how to use the machinery.
It doesn't matter if an employee feels that the equipment is overturning, train your workers to not jump out of a lift truck. The correct thing to do in this dangerous situation is to lean away from the turn while staying in the cab and holding on firmly.