Briggs Equipment sponsors FLTA Safety Conference and highlights ‘Safety Gains’

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15.

September

2014.

Briggs Equipment sponsors FLTA Safety Conference and highlights ‘Safety Gains’

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Date: 15th September 2014

Briggs Equipment sponsors FLTA Safety Conference and highlights ‘Safety Gains'

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Materials handling services specialist Briggs Equipment is to headline sponsor the 12^thNational Fork Lift Truck Safety Conference, organised bythe Fork Lift Truck Association (FLTA). The company will also discussits latest safety initiativeduring the event,which takes placeat Warwick University on September 24.

‘Is there a killer in your warehouse?' is the theme of this year's conference, which will address how efforts to create a safe working environment can be torpedoed by a culture of silence as it helps perpetuate dangerous practices and allows safety breaches to be ignored.

Briggs will highlight how the ‘Safety Gains' initiative, which is part of the company's highly successful BE Safe campaign, has encouraged employees to take responsibility for safety and help reduce the potential for injury to themselves and their colleagues.

The initiative has helped to open up channels of communication, making it easier for employees

to notify line managers and the health and safety team about hazards, near misses and unsafe conditions. Meanwhile, the company is not only responding by taking decisive action, but is

also updating employees about the improvements they have helped to bring about via its

monthly newsletter.

"Our engineers appreciate the dangers associated with their working environment, but while many were happy to tell us if they were concerned about safety issues, others were reluctant to do so. They assumed, quite wrongly, that someone else would do it or thought that by speaking up they might be causing trouble" says Scott McGready, a Senior Safety Health and Environment Quality Advisor at Briggs Equipment.

"Through ‘Safety Gains' we've been able to refocus attention on safety and show that it's in everyone's best interests to report hazards so that the company can take action. Importantly, the initiative is encouraging employees to think proactively about safety, identify opportunities to make improvements and then communicate their idea, enabling them to have a major input into developing best practice."

A representative from Briggs is also joining the FLTA Safety Conference's Practical Safety Panel - comprising legal, technical and insurance experts plus specialist representatives from the HSE and the TUC - to answer delegates' questions in an open forum debate.

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View this release on Briggs Equipment's online media centre

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