By: Jerry Plattenberg, Director, Safety, Health, and Environmental, Kelly®
Every warehouse leader I work with wants product out the door and every worker going home in the same condition they arrived in. Meeting both goals at once takes deliberate effort in warehousing, which recorded 4.8 injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time workers in 2024, about twice the rate for private industry overall.
I've spent 30 years in safety and industrial hygiene—starting in healthcare and moving through safety and industrial hygiene consulting, servicing multiple industry sectors before joining Kelly. The safety team assembled at Kelly comes with similar experience and we assess hazards for nearly every type of role we fill, and a large share of that work happens in warehouses and distribution centers. The injuries we see there tend to come from the same few places, and so do the practices that prevent them.
These warehouse safety tips cover the four areas where most injuries happen, why new and contingent workers face higher risk, and how to train, plan, and measure so safety holds up through peak season and turnover.
Most serious warehouse injuries trace back to the same four areas, and each one has controls that work when they're applied consistently.
Forklifts, order pickers, and platform trucks were the source of 84 work-related deaths in 2024. Much of that risk stems from the fact that each site's equipment, load weights, aisle widths, and traffic patterns are different from the last warehouse an operator worked in.
How to reduce the risk. Train every operator on your equipment and your floor. Classroom instruction covers the basics, but the hands-on portion, where an operator shows they can move loads safely in your environment, matters most. That’s true whether or not they have previous forklift experience.Under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard for powered industrial trucks, every operator needs practical training and an evaluation in the workplace before operating alone. The standard also ranked among the 10 most frequently cited OSHA standards in fiscal year 2025, across all industries.
In a fast-paced facility, operators are moving pallets while other workers pick, pack, and walk between stations. Forklift trucks and people don't mix, so every intersection where their paths cross is a point of risk.
How to reduce the risk. Keep people and equipment apart wherever you can. Designated walkways, clear floor markings, and strict traffic patterns give everyone a predictable path. Operators should slow down and sound the horn at every cross aisle and blind corner, which OSHA requires for good reason.
Shipping and receiving docks are among the busiest areas in a warehouse, and among the most dangerous when a trailer isn't secured. Over the course of my career, I've seen fatalities caused by a trailer pulling away from the dock while a forklift was inside.
How to reduce the risk. Secure every trailer before anyone enters it. OSHA requires the trailer's brakes to be set and its wheels chocked before a forklift drives onto it, and many sites add a dock lock as a second layer of protection. Then, set a clear procedure for entering and exiting trailers. A green and red light system and regular communication with the shipping and receiving clerk let everyone know when a trailer is safe to enter.
Pick-and-pack work repeats the same lifting, reaching, and twisting motions across an entire shift potentially leading to significant ergonomic hazards. In the most recent data available, overexertion and repetitive motion injuries caused more cases with days away, job restriction, or transfer than any other type of event.
How to reduce the risk. Design stations so most lifting happens in the power zone for lifting, close to the body and between mid-thigh and mid-chest height, where people can lift the most with the least effort. Keep frequently handled items within that range, use lift assists for heavier loads, and build stations that adjust for different heights, since a shorter worker and someone who's 6 feet 8 inches tall reach a conveyor very differently.
Utilize employee job rotations to reduce ergonomic risks from repetitive motion. Determine what different job tasks can be incorporated into the job rotation, paying particular attention to what muscle groups, postures, and frequency are being employed at each job task. Aim to ensure that each task is as different as possible from the previous task. Rotate employees throughout the shift at periodic intervals.
Ergonomic changes can lead to measurable improvements in a short time. One older facility we worked with was seeing repeated shoulder injuries from its manual processes. After the company added automation and made other changes to how the work was done, its ergonomic injuries had nearly disappeared within about a year.
Automation can help, but it needs its own safeguards. Collaborative robots can take over repetitive lifting, and they need safety measures such as pressure sensing, distance limits, and automatic shutdowns so a programming error can't put the people working next to them at risk. They also create maintenance and repair roles that require their own training.
The first months on any warehouse floor carry the most risk, and that risk climbs when an employer takes prior experience at face value.
New workers are most vulnerable early. Every new worker — whether hired directly or placed through a staffing partner — is more likely to get hurt in the first 90 days to six months, while they're still learning the building, equipment, and pace of the work. In OSHA's 2024 injury and illness case data, nearly a third of the cases employers reported occurred during a worker's first year on the job.
Unclear ownership raises the stakes. Workers placed through staffing agencies can face even higher risk when no one takes clear ownership of their safety preparation. In a Washington State study, these workers filed time-loss injury claims at about twice the rate of permanent peers across industries, despite similar or lower hazard exposure. Additionally, more than 40% of those interviewed had never received safety training from the company where they worked, compared with about 25% of permanent workers.
Training duties are split between two employers. Under OSHA guidance, the staffing agency typically provides general safety awareness training, and the host company provides site- and task-specific safety training that should match what its own employees receive. A good partner vets each worksite, prepares talent before placement, and works with you so that site training happens every time — even when a new operator says they've driven a forklift before.
Uneven training standards lead to incidents. I've seen it firsthand. Early in a partnership with one company in the South, a few near misses and incidents prompted us to take a closer look, and we found the company wasn't training contingent talent to the same standard as its full-time staff. Once we aligned on training equivalency, with the company delivering site-specific training as the operator of the site, incidents dropped dramatically over the following year.
Effective warehouse safety training is hands-on, specific to the site, and paced so people can absorb it. These practices make the biggest difference:
Training works best when someone owns it on-site. When a Fortune 100 chemical manufacturer's previous labor supplier fell short on safety measures at its warehouse, our team placed an on-site manager and built warehouse safety protocols and training into the program. The company went on to grow its headcount from five workers to 36 and add two packaging lines.
Rushed onboarding does the most damage during peak season. When a company needs 150 more people before the holidays, there's pressure to get them on a lift or into the pick-and-pack area the day they walk in. I understand that pressure, and our team at Kelly partners with our customers to ensure the best outcome for all workers. Bringing people on even a week before volume ramps up gives them time to finish training and get used to the pace before the busiest weeks arrive.
Most of us have been thrown into a new job sooner than we should have been. In an office, starting too soon makes for an uncomfortable first week. Around machinery and repetitive lifting, it's how people get hurt. Each medically consulted work injury cost an estimated $48,000 in 2024, including wage losses, medical expenses, and administrative costs. Weigh that figure against a few extra days of paid training when you build your seasonal plan. If you're arranging warehouse and distribution staffing for peak season, build that training time into each start date.
Workers report near misses when leaders make it safe to speak up and then act on what they hear.
Start with non-retaliation, and model it from the top. If someone almost hits a rack or a coworker, management should want to know about it. When a report comes in, thank the person, keep the conversation on what happened and how to prevent it, and make clear that speaking up won't count against them.
Fix what people report, and let them see it. When a worker flags a hazard and watches it get addressed, word spreads that the company is listening. Over time, that response does more to build a reporting culture than any poster on the breakroom wall.
Use technology as a backstop. Many forklifts can be equipped with proximity detection to warn operators of nearby pedestrians or objects. Impact detection is also available that alerts safety and operations managers when a vehicle bumps into something. The technology can be a double-edged sword, since it can feel like surveillance, but it also tells workers that incidents will come to light and reporting them is the better path.
Give contingent talent the same protections. Workers placed through a staffing agency may worry that reporting an injury could cost them the assignment or a full-time offer. When a company treats them differently from its own employees on those protections, they stop speaking up.
Injury counts tell you what already went wrong, and leading indicators show you what could go wrong next. Safety professionals call injury numbers lagging indicators because they record events after they happen. They're worth tracking because they can point to problems that aren't obvious from the floor, but by the time they move, someone has already been hurt. OSHA recommends using leading indicators to improve safety and lagging indicators to measure whether those efforts are working. In a warehouse, you can track leading indicators through activities like:
When an incident does happen, dig into the root cause and act on it. Peel the onion back, and nine times out of 10 you'll find a failure beyond employee behavior behind the event. OSHA's guidance on conducting incident investigations notes that most incidents blamed on unsafe behavior trace back to weaknesses in management or the safety program.
An outside safety partner often sees what a busy operations team has stopped noticing. Companies have production targets, operational demands, and products to get out the door, and it's easy to get so close to the day-to-day that hazards fade into the background. In my consulting work, I'd walk through a facility, ask about a process that was causing injuries, and often hear that the team had never thought about it that way. Someone coming in from outside notices different things, and an objective pair of eyes can open up solutions the team might have missed.
At Kelly Professional & Industrial, that perspective comes from a safety team with a breadth of experience in areas such as healthcare, manufacturing, mining, oil& gas, chemicals, automotive, warehousing, and environmental consulting. We evaluate every worksite our talent enters with a pre-assignment risk assessment, generic-level safety hazard awareness training to our contingent talent, and keep a Certified Industrial Hygienists on staff as a resource for clients and talent. When an investigation turns up a deficiency, we work through it together with the company's safety leaders.
That partnership approach recently earned Kelly a gold Safety Excellence Award from the Industry Business Roundtable, which requires a nomination from a client company and a field audit by industry peers. Whether you're onboarding a few new operators or a full peak-season team, we bring that same approach to every partnership. Let's talk about how our safety team can assess your sites and prepare talent before day one, so you can bring new people on with confidence. Learn more about our approach to workplace health and safety.