Day in and day out, your warehouse is receiving products, cataloging inventory, stocking shelves, fulfilling orders, and shipping goods to customers. There’s never a dull moment! And the key to success is having a well-trained team. Read on to learn the dos and don’ts of training warehouse employees.

Training Goals

As a trainer, your goal is to make sure your new employees are completing their work to the company’s expectations. You also want to make sure they work efficiently, but always focus on safety first. So how do you accomplish this?

Training Warehouse Employee Dos

• Do assess their skill set
  Assessing a new employee’s skill set will help you determine their greatest strengths and weaknesses. By learning about their experience, you’ll be able to offer meaningful feedback to improve their performance. You can also use an employee’s experience to your advantage by issuing them tasks that are a good fit for their skills.
• Do teach order tracking first
  By introducing order tracking at the outset of your training, warehouse employees will better understand how each of their tasks is interconnected with the warehouse supply chain. They will be able to see the big picture and will gain greater knowledge of picking strategies to fulfill orders, zones, and overall product organization.
• Do reward consistent work
  Rewarding employees who are doing consistent work will help keep morale and motivation levels high. Make an effort to acknowledge their contributions in front of your team. Doing so will help you instill pride in work and build a sense of camaraderie among employees.

Training Warehouse Employee Don’ts

• Don’t be hard to find
  New employees will inevitably have questions about warehouse processes. Make sure you’re available or that they have a resource they can go to with questions at all times. If an employee has to track you down every time they need an answer or if they get a hurried response, they can become discouraged and disengaged.
• Don’t overwhelm new workers
  You hire employees because you need help, so it can be easy to inundate your trainees. But you have to be careful about offloading too much, too quickly. Overwhelming new workers can lead to more mistakes and can result in burnout and low productivity.
• Don’t forget you were once a new employee
  Think about your own warehouse training experience use it to enhance your training strategies. Also, do your best to have patience as your trainees learn — and make all the same mistakes you made all those years ago. It’s easy to get frustrated, but it’s important not to lose sight of what your years of experience have taught you.

With a little planning and thoughtfulness, you can get new employees up to speed quickly, so warehouse operations continue to run efficiently..

Empty Trucking Position

Self-driving trucks may fill empty trucking positions Finding qualified LTL drivers has been a growing issue for years. Today, carriers are investigating new solutions. Self-driving trucks are being tested, and may eventually be a viable option for long and short-haul jobs. Removing a human driver from the equation may increase safety by eliminating fatigue risk. It will also dramatically reduce transportation costs, and will allow LTL carriers to expand routes to locations that were previously not feasible. A wide range of innovations are taking shape in the freight-transportation industry. From better logistics tools to self-driving trucks, these technologies will have a significant impact on the future of freight shipping.