Warehouse and Operations as a Career and I\u2019m Marty T Hawkins, I think this is the first episode that we don\u2019t have a title picked out as we\u2019re recording it. I usually work off of at least some bullet points or some article to talk to. Its storming really bad here in Dallas TX, I hope the episode sounds alright for ya today! Well, let\u2019s pick a topic, I\u2019ve worked on accident investigations all week so I guess we can start there, how about that, and well see where we end up! You know, accident investigations seem to really stress us as employees out, I see how it can seem more like an interrogation sometimes but actually accident investigations are designed to help our companies, our industry and us employees. I do a lot of incident or accident Investigations, I learn something from each one of them, when completed properly we hope to be able to avoid the same thing from happening again. I hope if we\u2019re in a management role we\u2019ve been trained to gather all the information for our company officials, health care providers and legal teams so they can protect our employees. Our industry does a great job learning from these incidents and creating processes and procedures or rules to help identify and prevent them from happening again. When our supervisors take the time to find the Who, What, Where, When and How through their investigations it makes us all safer. I see a lot of associates try and be a little less than forth coming with answers sometime, Ladies and Gentlemen, be honest. The investigation will produce the truth, these days 9 out of 10 times there\u2019s going to be a video of the incident, or a witness is going to describe what happened better than we will. I\u2019m sure, or I hope, that we were all told when we were hired that it is so important to report any accident or incident immediately to our supervisors. Just today I know of a gentleman that was let go. Not for bending the racking while placing a pallet up in the reserves but because another employee mentioned it before he did. In his defense I\u2019m not certain that he was even aware he\u2019d bent it but he would have had to know that he\u2019d touched it or hit it. I think it was probably his defensive voice or tone when being questioned during the investigation that actually cost him his job.
\nLet\u2019s take equipment operators for example, we\u2019re trained to be aware of our surroundings, how to properly operate the equipment and all the safety rules that govern their operation. The rules that are in place today are the result of years\u2019 worth of incident investigations. An incident or accident occurred and we as an industry learned from it, created a rule or procedure to prevent it from happening again. That\u2019s truly what accident investigations are. There to help us be safer and work in a safe environment.
\nI was working on one case; a gentleman had reached over his head to scoot a pallet off of a stack of 12 and lost control of it and it landed on his little toe. Three things were discovered during the investigation. First his supervisor had not noticed that his shoes only looked like steel toe boots while in fact they were not. It was determined going forward that the supervisor would be verbally checking with his crew each day at the start up meeting to ensure that they had their proper PPE\u2019s on. Secondly, it was determined that pallets would only be stacked 10 high going forward as 12 required most employees to stretch way over their heads to scoot the pallet towards them. And lastly it was decided that associates should be wearing gloves when working with pallets. These procedures were put into place because of an investigation and should help prevent someone else getting injured in the same way! This guy lost 7 days of work. The investigation stressed him. Naturally he felt like the finger was being pointed at him, that\u2019s the human nature in all of us. After it was completed, he felt much better about it and was fine.