How to Improve Warehouse Safety With Floor Signs

Warehouse safety should be a top priority of any company looking to improve their operations and remain productive year-round. After all, a safe warehouse is a productive one. Injuries and illnesses caused by unsafe workspaces can knock out a workforce and reduce efficiency throughout the supply chain. Floor signs are a pivotal part of any warehouse that takes safety seriously and wants to keep their warehouse running at peak efficiency.

To find out how floor signs can assist your warehouse, first learn about what they are and the purposes they can serve. You should also know why they’re so essential to improve your facility’s overall safety.

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What Are Floor Signs?

Floor safety signs come in the form of a decal you can apply to a floor. They’ll feature text and graphics to get people’s attention in a warehouse. The signs come in different colors to reinforce a message. You can find them in a variety of shapes, like triangles, circles, rectangles and polygons.

The best floor signs are customizable to meet your needs. While there are common messages, like stop signs, you may also make unique modifications to their shape, text and graphics to better fit your warehouse’s requirements.

Floor Sign Purposes

Floor signs can fulfill various purposes, making them one of the most versatile types of signage you can invest in for your warehouse. They primarily improve the safety of the warehouse and provide directions. To give you a deeper understanding of how to use floor signs, consider some of their top applications below.

Encourage social distancing: It is beneficial to keep staff socially distanced to prevent the spread of illness in the workplace or the public. Floor signs can show how far apart staff should be when they’re in the same area. You can also put them at workstations to keep employees separated while doing their daily tasks.
Remind staff of workplace safety procedures: Staffers might forget workplace policies or take a relaxed approach. Floor signs that remind employees of various policies can help staff remember not to disregard safety standards. For instance, you can place a floor sign in front of a workstation, reminding staff to wear protective equipment when conducting the task.
Alert staff of hazards: Spills and other workplace hazards can be a major threat to your warehouse’s safety. You don’t want staff to get injured because they’re unaware of a slippery floor or a dangerous area. Signs can warn staff of various hazards and instruct them on what to do to stay safe while in a hazardous environment.
Direct workplace traffic: If you operate a warehouse, you know how many moving parts there are. You don’t want forklifts to go down the wrong path and block other machine traffic. Floor signs can give workers instructions on where they need to walk or the route they need to follow while operating vehicles. These instructions improve both the safety and efficiency of your workplace.

The Need for Floor Signs

In today’s warehouse and manufacturing industries, there’s a greater push for improved safety at the workplace. Whether it’s to prevent diseases from spreading in the workplace or reduce the rate of injuries that occur during work, companies want to make their workspace safer.

Without proper safety procedures, your company runs the risk of reduced efficiency and productivity. For example, when an employee gets sick, others have to cover their shifts, pulling them away from their primary tasks. If multiple employees get sick, it could leave you with a depleted workforce, unable to keep up with demand.

Besides the possibility of a virus harming your workforce’s productivity, a lack of safety can also lead to workplace injuries. These injuries can sideline workers, forcing a company to try to maintain the same efficiency with less staff. Injuries in the workplace can also lead to companies paying workers’ comp claims and covering medical expenses. In 2018, the National Safety Council found work injuries cost companies a total of $170.8 billion that year alone.

To prevent financial and productivity losses, you’re going to need an effective safety program. These programs will incorporate signage and practices to ensure workers are going about their tasks in the safest way possible. By securing your workplace, you’ll likely see a rise in productivity. A study found that 83% of manufacturing leaders saw their workforce’s productivity rise after implementing safety programs.

Floor signs are part of any effective safety program in a warehouse. You can place signage all around the workplace in central locations to ensure staff members are always aware of the latest practices. These signs can keep workers healthy while improving warehouse productivity. Companies looking to optimize their workspace should know how to harness the benefits of floor signs.

Improving Warehouse Safety With Floor Sign

The many ways to use floor signs provide abundant opportunities to improve your warehouse safety. Floor signs are quite versatile in terms of their safety applications. They can do everything from giving directions and marking evacuation routes to encouraging social distancing and warning people of hazards.

If you’re serious about improving your warehouse’s safety, look at some of the top ways to make your warehouse a safer place to work.

Using Floor Signs for Directions

Alongside encouraging social distancing, floor signs can guide people around the workplace. Knowing how to mark directions in warehouses is crucial for safety, as you want to make sure workers stay out of the path of heavy machines and safely navigate the space.

One popular type of floor sign comes in the form of an arrow pointing traffic in the appropriate direction. These arrows can ensure workers drive machinery down an aisle correctly and stay away from areas that could be dangerous to others or the operator. In common vehicle pathways, you can also put other warning signs on the floor that alert workers to stay attentive when entering or crossing through these zones.

You can also create custom directional signs specifying who should use a particular path. For example, if you have the space for it, you may want to use two different floor sign types to mark pedestrian walkways and vehicular traffic paths. These pathways will keep potentially dangerous vehicles in their proper lane and give workers a safe place to walk.

With these signs, colors can indicate possible dangers. Yellow directional signs can suggest staff should slow down and take caution, while red can stop a worker from jumping out into heavy traffic or in an area with low visibility.

As you can tell, there are multiple directional floor sign benefits. By ensuring everyone knows where they should be going and warning them of dangerous areas, you raise the overall level of safety. Directional floor signs help prevent machines from crashing into one another or bumping into workers in their path. Besides their value to safety, they also improve productivity by guiding staff along the fastest route.

Using Floor Signs for Social Distancing

Wondering how to mark social distances properly? Floor signs can help. To comply with public health recommendations for workplaces to encourage social distancing, you’ll need to find ways to show people how far apart they should be. Since they’ll be in the habit of talking or working close to each other, it’s essential to have reminders that make it hard for staff to forget these guidelines.

The central tenet of social distancing guidelines is keeping people separated. In general, the farther away your workers are from one another, the more you can decrease the spread of germs. By encouraging social distancing throughout the workplace, you lower your workers’ risk of becoming ill and taking sick leave to recover.

Floor signs are excellent for social distancing restrictions, as you can place them around a warehouse in a variety of forms. They’re often straightforward, installed on the ground with short messages reminding staff to avoid direct contact and stay a recommended distance from one another.

Say, for instance, you have two workers who must operate a machine or complete a task together. To prevent them from working too close together or lowering their guard, you can place signs on the ground that give a clear indicator of where they should each be standing. Having such obvious station positions also reduces confusion about how far apart workers should be from each other while doing their tasks.

Besides placing floor signs by work stations, you can also put them around breakrooms to show how far people should be sitting or standing from one another. If lines regularly form at the warehouse for different tasks, you can also put the signs down to show where everyone should be standing while waiting.

Some of the benefits of using floor signs for social distancing include the following.

Prevents a rapid spread: Viruses can spread quickly in crowded areas, with one infected person possibly passing a disease to everyone in the room with them. This quick spread can be devastating for a company’s workforce, as one infected person coming into work could share germs with many other staff members. Social distancing signs help slow the spread by keeping people farther apart.
Reduces the chance of transfer: Many viruses spread through direct contact. Actions like handshakes can lead to transmission of contaminants. For example, if someone touches their face after shaking a sick person’s hand, there’s a chance for germs to reach their eyes or mouth. Floor signs keep people separated and remind them not to risk contamination through direct contact with one another.
Limits the risk of airborne bacteria: When you stand closer to someone, airborne droplets from talking, coughing or sneezing have a much higher chance of reaching you. If the person is sick, the particles they emit could end up spreading the virus to you. By staying separated and following the distance recommendations on the floor signs, workplaces can reduce the chance these potentially dangerous particles spread to others.

Using Floor Signs to Mark Hazards and Evacuation Routes

Floor caution signs are excellent at showcasing where hazards or dangerous zones are in your workplace. If there are any slippery areas or spills in your warehouse, place signs on the ground to ensure people see the potential danger and avoid it. You can also put them at the entrance to areas where staff will be handling hazardous materials, reminding them of safety procedures and equipment needed in that section of the warehouse.

You probably have zones you need to keep clear due to safety concerns. For instance, surround areas storing potentially dangerous chemicals with signage to warn staff from entering without the proper equipment. For sections of your warehouse that require anyone entering them to wear personal protective equipment, you can have your floor signs carry a message reminding staff of these requirements.

Alongside keeping hazardous areas clear, you may also want to highlight tripping hazards. Uneven floors and spaces with lots of loose material should have floor signs to catch a staff member’s attention and make them proceed with caution. To protect staff from electrical dangers, you can place floor signs around the area to make sure workers are aware of electrical panels and the risk that comes with them.

Besides marking off potentially dangerous areas, you can also use them to point out emergency exits and evacuation routes. If a fire or other type of hazardous event occurs at the warehouse, floor signs can help workers and visitors find their way out of the warehouse quickly. Put these evacuation marks along the route in a position that’s easy for employees to view. Signage can also carry crucial messages about safety practices when evacuating the facility.

Browse Cherry’s Floor Signs to Improve Your Warehouse Safety

Want to improve the safety of your warehouse with floor signs? Look to Cherry’s Material Handling. We have a variety of floor signs and tapes available for your company to choose from as you work to secure your warehouse. Besides our premade options, we can also help you design and engineer safety signs that fit your warehouse. You’ll also be glad to know Cherry’s signs are easy to remove, making them quite adaptable to your company’s changing needs.

Browse our selection of high-quality floor safety signs or tape to help you find the best graphics for your needs. If you have any questions, please contact us, and one of our friendly representatives will be happy to help.