When you have employees working in a location such as a factory floor or in a warehouse, it is absolutely essential that their health and safety during the course of their work is your number one priority.
If you let your workers do their work with little to no input from you as to how they should organize their separate work areas and ensure everything is done in a way which promotes safety as well as efficiency, you will pretty soon end up in hot water as you will start dealing with a flood of lawsuits from employees suing you because they have been working in an unsafe environment!
Apart from ensuring that your workers get the relevant health and safety training to ensure that they don’t put their lives or that of their colleagues at risk from unsafe working practises, it is ultimately your responsibility as their boss to ensure that their individual working areas are organized and clearly marked.
The best way of doing so is to use some floor safety tape. In the past, many businesses would paint lines on the floor indicating everyone’s different work areas and the main aisles and passageways, but this method was often slow and inaccurate to carry out.
Nowadays, they tend to use floor safety tape, and there are differently colored tapes that can be used to denote certain conditions (such as safe and unsafe areas).
If you are going to be installing some safety tape in your factory or warehouse, here is a handy guide that shows you how to do so.
Choose the Right Tape
The first thing you need to do is make sure you use the right tape for the job. The different colors used are as follows:
- Red = danger;
- Fluorescent orange = biosafety warning;
- Yellow = caution;
- Orange = warning;
- Green = safety;
- Blue = information;
- Black, white or yellow (or a combination thereof) = boundaries;
- Magenta or purple with yellow = radiation caution.
Once you have identified the area that you need to use tape for and what type (color) of tape you need to use, you will need to determine exactly how much tape you need; the last thing you want to do is start laying down tape and then finding out that you’ve run out halfway through the job!
Clean the Area thoroughly
You will need to thoroughly clean the floor where the tape is going to be installed; this means getting your mop and bucket out, I’m afraid! You could obviously get someone else to do it, but you would have to explain to them where to clean and ensure that the area is cleaned properly.
Laying Down the Tape
Once the floor is completely dry, you can start laying the tape down. It is better if you can use a tape-laying device, like the kind used in gyms, because it will ensure that you can do long, straight lines.
You will need to firmly press down on the tape as you lay it, and you must lay the tape slowly in order to ensure a successful result.
