24/7 safety: protecting night shift workers in the warehouse

As anyone who has ever worked nights knows, shift work can be tough on your body – particularly in the winter months.

Add to that the pressure of working in a warehouse, where the darkness makes most tasks more tiring, and loading and unloading vehicles outdoors miserable in poor weather, and you might find your team struggling.

As a warehouse manager, it’s important to be aware of the risks to night shift workers in particular, so you can help protect your team against injury and illness.

Fatigue management

For your workers, staying safe on the night shift first requires them to focus on themselves.

Lower light levels can cause fatigue, which in turn can lead to a decline in physical and/or mental performance. This might manifest in a reduced ability to process information, lapses in memory, slower reactions, reduced co-ordination, a lack of attention, decreased awareness, and an inability to properly assess risks – all of which are potentially dangerous when working around machinery and/or moving vehicles.

Fatigue is even more likely if work is particularly complex, repetitive, or machine-led.

To protect themselves against fatigue, your employees should try to take good care of their physical health: maintaining a healthy weight, eating a balanced diet with sufficient vitamin D and iron, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep. They should also take steps to reduce stress by consciously building relaxation time into their day.

In turn you, as their employer, have a responsibility to ensure that your shift patterns allow everyone to have sufficient rest and recovery time in between their working hours, and that you encourage them to take good care of themselves during that time.

Find out more about fatigue management in shift work and what you can do to protect your team.

Keeping workplaces safe after dark

Another element of keeping your night shift workers safe is ensuring that their working environment is safe for them to use after dark.

This means:

• Ensuring there is adequate lighting around your workplace for them to see and be seen, as well as to spot any hazards that might be on the ground. Lighting should be good enough for people to make out different colours. When assessing your lighting, pay close attention to situations where people will be required to move between neighbouring work areas with different levels of light and ensure you allow for the additional risks this might pose to their safety.
  
  
• Providing them with hi vis clothing, particularly if they are working close to moving vehicles. This hi vis clothing should be worn at all times. Take care to ensure the correct class of hi vis is worn, with the appropriate amount of reflective material. As a rule, those working after dark should wear either Class 2 or Class 3 PPE as their outermost layer of clothing. Discover our extensive range of hi vis jumpers and coats in our online store.
  
  
• Maintaining good housekeeping. Just as walkways and work areas should be kept clean and clutter-free during the day to avoid the risk of slips, trips and falls, they should also be the same during the night shift, even if you have fewer workers on the clock. Encourage your day shift workers to leave their work stations clean and tidy for the next shift, and promote a ‘see it, sort it’ culture among all your employees so that any hazards such as spills that occur are dealt with promptly.

Finally, don’t forget that temperatures often drop at night, increasing the risk of ice forming during the winter months. Site managers running round-the-clock warehouses should have procedures for monitoring forecasted day and night time temperatures and deploying grit at entrances and walkways whenever the mercury is predicted to dip close to or beyond 0°c. During the wintertime it is also more important than ever to make sure your shift workers are equipped with high quality safety footwear with good slip resistance to help prevent them slipping on wet or icy ground.

Protecting night shift workers in a 24/7 warehouse should be considered as part of a comprehensive risk assessment of site health and safety. For more information and advice on assessing risks in your workplace, give our team a call on 0121 749 4433 or contact us here.