Paying Attention

Warehouse and Operations as a Career

Marty here with Warehouse and Operations as a Career! I hope you enjoy our show each week and we’re offering up something you can take away from it and it helps you in your career some how or way. We have a lot of fun sharing our experiences and really enjoy getting to throw in an opinion or two every once and a while! Don’t forget about our Facebook & Twitter page’s where you can find us @whseandops, oh and the warehouse equipment operators community group on Facebook, it’s a great place for everyone to share their day and thoughts with a likeminded set of individuals. Well as they say, on with the show I guess so let’s talk about some of the little things that happen to us as warehousemen and transportation employees on literally a daily basis and why its important we always stay focused on our jobs and our positions.

I was speaking with someone who had just received a corrective action for a minor incident with a piece of equipment. He was placing a pallet, with a counterbalance forklift and as he was reversing from the pallet the back of his forklift hit a fire extinguisher that was hanging on an end cap adjacent from the wall slot he was working at. The butt of his lift raked the extinguisher from its hook and it fell to the ground. There wasn’t any real damage, it did discharge however making quite a mess and broke the handle off of it. Now he did the right thing and reported it immediately to his supervisor, as we’ve learned we need to always report any incident no manner how small it is immediately. Anyway she understood and even helped him sweep up all the powder from the floor. I think that’s why he was so surprised about an hour later she called him into the office and counseled him with a written warning. After leaving her office he was really upset and using his words “confused”. Remember, guys and gals a written warning is not a bad thing and there’s no reason to get upset over one. None of us likes to hear that we’ve done anything wrong but I’ve always tried, successfully most of the time, to think of it as a learning experience. If it’s something worth writing down on paper it’s probably something important. In my experience most corrective actions are rooted or based on something we as the employee did, he did hit the fire extinguisher causing it to discharge. After speaking with him he agreed and understood, he said he was actually singing while he was backing up and just not paying attention, he kind of laughed that it happened because he works around that bay 20 times a day. I’ve heard he’s turned in 4 or 5 Near Miss thoughts recently, so in his case that little talk accomplished what it was intended too. The employee is working on staying focused and actually noticing things that could rear up as a problem in the future for himself or others!

That story reminds me of another Associate, he was a pallet sorter, his task is separating the good wood from the broken pallets, responsible for neatly stacking good pallets up in nice stacks for the receivers and the selectors and loading all the broken pallets or bad wood onto a trailer to be sent out for repair. He showed up on a Friday to work his shift but had forgotten his steel toe shoes and his supervisor wouldn’t let him go to work. Well, that upset him quite a bit but he lived pretty close, so he went home and got them and came back to work. After lunch he went over to his Sup, and their pretty good friends anyway, but he apologized to his boss telling him that a few minutes earlier while he was reaching up to drag a pallet off of some bad wood that it’d slid down and landed right on the toes of his boots! If he’d of had his tennis shoes on it’d of smashed his toes big time. Needless to say he wasn’t upset with his boss anymore, at least for the rest of that day!

You know, here at WAOC we talk a lot about rules and why we have them in our industry. I think that’s a good example of a valuable rule. 99% of the time nothings going to happen until it does.

Another quick story, a selector was pulling a case of Bal-sam-ic Vinegar, 4 – 1 gallons, what it was has nothing to do with the story unless you’ve smelled bal-sam-ic vinegar before, anyway she broke one of the glass bottles dropping the case on her pallet and it cracked or broke. She grabbed it pretty quick and got it over to the side at the end cap to a trash can so it didn’t leak the whole gallon onto the floor. She didn’t stop to clean it up and meant to tell the sanitation guy but she got busy and just didn’t do it. Well, on her next batch, driving through the same aisle her pallet jack slid as she was trying to stop and she ended up hitting an upright and breaking a case of another item! Once again, as an employee, she was really upset when she was written up on a warning report for not reporting the original spill and received 2 points on her safety record for hitting the racking and damaging another case with her jack.

Rules, boy I tell you rules seem to be that one thing that us as humans constantly have issues with or regard as unfair, of course there only unfair when we’re the ones that didn’t follow them. I had a buddy that just got a ticket for riding in the HOV lane as a single passenger. An HOV lane which stands for high occupancy vehicle is a lane that you can drive in if you have 2 or more people in your vehicle and of course he’s really upset with the cost of that ticket! Now he knew what the lane was, what it was for and the cost for breaking that particular law or rule yet he’s guilty of ignoring it!

On a heavier note I know an order selector that was creeping his jack, meaning he was walking along side it, just reaching over and rolling the throttle forward as he walked it down the aisle because he had several slots in a row to select from. Sure enough another selector turned into the aisle and bumped the back pallet on his load moving his jack forward and pinning his ankle in between the rack and his standing platform. If he’d been standing on the platform, riding the jack properly or following the preferred work methods that he’d been taught he would of saved himself a lot of pain and the 6 days of lost wages!

I don’t know what it is about rules and why us as humans struggle with them so often. We know they’ve been written to avoid something from happening or to ease our lives in some way but the human nature in us wins out sometimes. Again 99% of the time theirs no cop there when we make that left hand turn from the center lane to avoid waiting our turn, or we can jump in the HOV lane when we’re in a hurry or run that red light so we don’t have to wait 2 more minutes on the next one. 99% of the time nothing happens, but that 1 out of a hundred can be expensive or bad, life altering or even life ending. Same holds true in our work lives. I don’t know why we get upset when we’re clearly, most of the time admittedly doing something the wrong way and someone calls us out on it or we receive a corrective action.

I hope we always receive the proper training for our jobs and that the rules, policies and procedures have been explained to us, and that if we don’t understand something or have questions that we raise our hands and speak up. I feel that’s as much our responsibility as our management teams to make sure we know what to do. That being said though means that we accept the responsibility to follow those very rules, policies and procedures right? I assure you we’ll be safer, advance more quickly in our careers and be a much happier employee ourselves!

I have the opportunity to visit several companies each week and meet new employees and visit with different management teams and another little thing, or what we as employees perceive as a little thing is those pesky time clocks. It’s another one of those tasks that are really our responsibility but, well, human nature kicks in every once and a while and here we go again. It’s so easy to get distracted when we’re arriving to work or on our way to lunch, and its super easy to forget to punch out at the end of our shifts. A very minor issue to us employees but it’s honestly a big deal for our employers. First there’s laws and regulations that they have to follow and there responsible for recording. You would not believe how long it could take at some companies to get our forgotten punch corrected. In many organizations only a few people can even make adjustments to our times and really I guess we’d want it that way. We punch correctly, and we get paid correctly, it’s honestly as simple as that. I’ve seen people get upset and quit their job because they we’re missing a few hours or a days pay while admitting they had forgot to make that punch. I couldn’t blame’ em for being upset but the company was trying to get him the money as quickly as possible but it couldn’t happen that Friday! I felt for him but hey, it starts with us punching in and out. Its going to happen, we’re all human. I tell associates to see their supervisor as soon as they realize a punch’s been missed so they can start the process to get it corrected. One thing we don’t think about sometimes is our weekly payroll has to go in or be processed by Tuesday each week for us to get our checks on Friday’s. If our supervisor turns our time in on Monday morning it’s gone and sent within the next 24 hours. Just another little thing to us, but wow what an impact that little rule can have on us as employees, our companies and, in some instances our families.

Well enough of the little things, I’m sure we all have a hundred examples or stories we could share, I know I’ve had all these things happen to me before and I’ve had my feelings hurt because I was counseled about it, but in the end I’d like to think that I realized I was the responsible party and that I learned from it!

Let’s see, Next week we’re going to talk about Logistics, what it is and all the opportunities those positions can bring us! I’ve had a couple of questions on 3pl’s too, I’m going to reach out to some subject matter experts and we’ll get an episode put together, it’ll be fun learning about those opportunities too.

Thanks for checking in with us here at WAOC today, shoot us an email to [e-mail] if you’d like to comment or suggest a topic for us to look into. Until next week, please think Safe and lets all take responsibility for the Rules!