Prevent the preventable: Before the shift starts

At an Australian food manufacturer, every forklift is checked before every shift. Drivers work through a checklist in Inspections and add a photo for any fault.

One morning, the check flagged loose connections and faulty wires on a forklift battery.

A maintenance request went out that same morning. The wires were replaced before the forklift moved. Nothing happened that day, which was the point.

It would be easy to file this under equipment maintenance. The person who’d have been driving it might see it differently. Data shared by Allianz Australia puts personal injury claims related to forklifts at $123 million (reference here), and forklifts are the second most common asset owned by businesses globally, so this sort of exposure sits in a lot of your clients’ sheds.

The timing is the useful part. The check happens before the shift starts, so a problem is found while it’s still a maintenance job, and the person closest to the machine is the one who finds it. For you, it’s also a record of what a client does day to day, not just what’s written in a policy. It shows how they think about risk, too. A business that checks before the shift starts is usually treating risk as part of running the place, not a job for renewal time.

A freezer door left open over a weekend usually goes unnoticed until Monday.

One Mitti customer had a sensor on theirs. When the door was left open, it sent an alert and someone got there first. The stock loss in this case was $1,714.

Nothing about it is dramatic, which is what makes it easy to picture in a client’s own premises. The sensor didn’t make anyone more careful. It just kept watching across the weekend, overnight and through every handover.

The business had decided ahead of time how it would find out.

That’s a choice, and it gets made before anything goes wrong. Someone had to put money and time into a sensor, set it up and make sure the alert reached a real person, all while the freezer was working perfectly well. Prevention rarely comes with a deadline, which is why it’s so easy to put off.

The payoff, when it works, is a Monday morning that looks like any other. It’s a handy example for a client who’s weighing up where to spend.

Trippas White Group runs more than 150 venues across six states, with around 3,000 people on the roster. For a long time, an issue meant a piece of paper that travelled to head office while everyone hoped for the best. Even the 152-question safety audit could be ticked off at a desk and filed in a drawer.

Then they put a QR code on the wall. Staff could scan it, snap a photo and file a report in seconds. Some were the sort of thing you’d expect, like a fridge running at the wrong temperature. Others were smaller and sneakier, like a screw missing from a guest’s seat.

The group’s compliance manager’s first reaction was to wonder whether they really had this many issues. They did, and they’d been there all along. Reported hazards and near misses rose 17x a month – but this wasn’t a bad thing.

Triage came next. Each report is rated low, medium or high, so a scratch on a wall doesn’t compete with a nail poking up on a stair.

That visibility showed where help was needed most, and the group aimed its training there. Its lost time injury frequency rate came down.

Next time you’re across the table from a client, these three are worth a try. They’re conversation starters, and none of them needs a policy document.

Three businesses, three different ways of noticing. A check before a shift, a sensor on a door and a sensor on a door and a QR code on the wall.. None of it is complicated, and each one found something while it was still small.

That’s the idea behind Prevent the Preventable: the small thing, found early, while it’s still easy to fix.

It’s also National Safe Work Month, which runs to the end of October. Across Australia, there were more than 400 serious workers’ compensation claims a day in 2023-24.