Manager crucial in warehouse safety

Leadership and safety are constantly linked. This emerges from the thesis of PhD student Jelle de Vries. He investigated to what extent a manager plays a role in safety on theshop floor. De Vries came to the conclusion that 'the role of a manager iscrucialisin creating safety in warehousesand a focus on safetynotneedlead to reduced productivity'. EVO recently published the thesis' conclusions.

Credibility of eand manager is essential, concludes De Vries. "Anyone who wants to have an efficient and safe warehouse must set a good example themselves and be able to inspire and make employees aware of the dangers of their work," he tells EVO. "There has to be a balance with credibility. If the supervisor accepts that a footpath is blocked by a pallet, then building a footpath as a safety measure is not credible."

Robots
The PhD student also investigated the role of humans compared to machines and robots. Humans are indispensable, De Vries observed . Results are not achieved by technology alone, but workers continue to play a crucial role. He reached the conclusions by having students from a Rotterdam school participate in his research. "In the experimental setup, the differences in productivity between the picking tools turned out to be relatively small. I didn't need to establish that either, because it wasn't a comparison on productivity. I wanted to investigate the influence of people," De Vries informs EVO. The right people in the right place ensure better results. "Employees with a focus on prevention work accurately but are slower. People with a focus on promotion are focused on achieving success and go for speed; they are willing to take mistakes for granted that may have to be corrected afterwards. I learned from this that you can determine warehouse productivity by paying attention to behavioural traits when recruiting employees."

Practice and subjects
To get the most representative result possible, he combined working with students with practice during his research. "By involving practice in research, reality was brought in," he says. When researching the manager's role in warehouse safety, the researcher ran into the issue of which comes first: a safe workplace or the manager. "Does the manager create a safer warehouse, or are safer warehouses more likely to have safety-conscious managers? I have not been able to establish causality with certainty, but if you want a safe warehouse, look at characters. Managers and employees focused on production are willing to take risks and make mistakes, but that in itself says little about productivity. Perhaps there is more damage or work done has to be corrected afterwards."

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