Most workplace safety tips are written for a building full of desks. They are about posture, screen height and taking a break from sitting. None of that describes a crew that spends the morning moving stock and the afternoon on the road.
If your team loads, lifts and drives, the risk profile is different and so is the fix. This is the version for an owner with six or ten people and no safety officer on payroll: what actually injures a crew like yours, what to do about each thing, and what a regulator expects to see if they ever walk in.
The Bottom Line
- Transportation and warehousing recorded 261,500 nonfatal injury cases in 2024 at a rate of 4.4 per 100 workers, the highest of any large sector.
- Three places account for most of it: the floor, the lift, and the vehicle. Fix those and you have fixed most of your exposure.
- Sprains and strains lead the table. Days-away cases involving sprains, strains and tears reached 568,150 in 2024.
- OSHA renewed its warehousing and distribution National Emphasis Program on 31 July 2026, running five years to 2031, and it explicitly covers parcel delivery and courier services.
- A ten-minute weekly walk beats an annual policy document nobody reads.
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Why delivery and warehousing work carries a higher injury rate
The numbers are not close. Transportation and warehousing logged 261,500 nonfatal cases in 2024 at a rate of 4.4 per 100 workers, the highest among the large sectors BLS tracks (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, retrieved 2026-09-25). Warehouse operations specifically came in around 4.8 per 100 full-time employees.
The reason is structural rather than cultural. This work combines heavy repeated lifting, moving equipment, wet or cluttered floors, time pressure at the loading point, and then a vehicle. Most workplaces have one or two of those. A business that ships its own goods has all of them, often inside the same two hours.
Time pressure is the multiplier worth naming. Nearly every serious incident in a small delivery operation traces back to someone hurrying: carrying two boxes because a third trip felt slow, skipping the ramp, reversing without a spotter because there was no one free. Safety systems that ignore the schedule get ignored back.
If you are about to walk the building looking for hazards, it is worth doing the cost walk at the same time. The route is identical and the energy saving tips for delivery operations guide covers what to look at on the equipment-and-bill side, so one lap through the building answers two questions instead of one.
The three places a delivery crew actually gets hurt
Rather than a list of forty hazards, sort your risk into three buckets. Almost everything that will injure someone in your business lives in one of them.
The first is the floor: slips, trips and falls, plus anything falling onto someone from a shelf. Slip and trip accidents account for a substantial share of major injuries in warehouse environments, and poorly stacked inventory causes thousands of struck-by injuries a year.
The second is the lift, meaning manual handling: the moment of picking something up, turning with it, or setting it down. This is where sprains and strains come from, and sprains and strains are the single largest injury category in the data.
The third is the vehicle: loading, securing, reversing, and then the drive itself. It is the bucket with the lowest incident count and the highest severity.
Sorting this way is useful because each bucket has a different fix. The floor is solved by housekeeping. The lift is solved by equipment and technique. The vehicle is solved by procedure. Mixing them into one generic safety policy is why generic safety policies do not work.
Preventing slips, trips and falls on a working floor
Housekeeping sounds like the least serious item on any safety list and it prevents more injuries than anything else you will do.
Fix spills immediately, and make immediately mean immediately. A cone next to a wet patch is a plan to deal with it later, not a fix. In food businesses, the walk-in doorway and the dish area are the two places to check first, because condensation and splash-out make them wet even on a day nobody spilled anything.
Keep aisles clear, not mostly clear. The pallet parked “just for a minute” at the end of an aisle is the classic small-business trip hazard, because everybody knows it is there until the one person who does not walks into it carrying a box.
Stack with weight low and never above shoulder height on open shelving. Poorly stacked inventory is responsible for over 20,000 injuries a year from falling objects, and almost all of them come from stacking that was fine when it was built and became unstable as items were pulled from it.
Light the places people work, not just the places people walk. A dim loading area at 5am is a hazard that disappears from view during a daytime inspection.
Deal with floor surfaces properly. Anti-slip matting at the entrance, the cold room door and the wash area is cheap, and worn matting that has curled at the edge has become the hazard it was bought to prevent.
Safe lifting and manual handling for a small crew
Sprains and strains dominate the injury statistics. Days-away-from-work cases involving sprains, strains and tears reached 568,150 in 2024, and overexertion and bodily reaction remains the largest category by event type (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, retrieved 2026-09-25).
Technique training helps, but it is the weakest of the three tools available and it is the one most businesses rely on exclusively. In order of what actually works:
Change the load. Order in smaller cases where a supplier offers them. Split a heavy container into two before it needs carrying. A 40lb box that arrives as two 20lb boxes has removed a risk permanently, with no training required and no compliance to monitor.
Change the equipment. A hand truck, a pallet jack, a rolling cart, a height-adjustable trolley. Most small operations are one cart short of eliminating their worst regular lift, and a cart costs less than a single insurance claim’s excess.
Change the height. The worst lifts are from floor level and from above the shoulder. Storing heavy and frequently-moved items between knee and chest height removes the bad lift before technique is even relevant.
Then teach technique: feet apart, bend the knees, load close to the body, turn with the feet rather than twisting at the waist, and ask for help above a stated weight. Set that weight as a number, because “if it feels too heavy” is a threshold that moves when someone is in a hurry.
Two-person lifts need a nominated leader who counts. Two people lifting on different counts is worse than one person lifting alone.
Loading and unloading safety at the dock, the ramp and the tailgate
The loading point is where the building’s risks and the vehicle’s risks meet, usually while someone is watching the clock.
Chock the wheels and confirm the vehicle cannot move before anyone steps into the back of it. Vehicle creep during loading is a well-known and entirely preventable cause of serious injury.
Use a spotter for every reversing manoeuvre in a yard where people are on foot, and agree the hand signals in advance. If there is nobody to spot, walk the path first.
Secure the load before driving, not at the first corner. Unsecured stock in a van becomes a projectile under braking, and in a food business it is also the difference between a delivery and a write-off.
Keep the ramp and tailgate clear and dry, and never carry a load down a ramp you cannot see over.
Set a rule that nobody carries a load they cannot see past. It is the single most violated informal rule in small delivery operations and the cause of a disproportionate share of falls.
Delivery driver safety once the van leaves the building
The vehicle bucket extends well past driving technique, and the part owners forget is that a driver working alone has none of the informal safety net a shop floor provides.
Build realistic schedules. A route that only works if every stop goes perfectly is a schedule that produces speeding and rushed unloading, and no amount of safety messaging beats a timetable that cannot be met.
Plan for lone working. Agree a check-in expectation, make sure a phone is charged, and be explicit that a driver may leave a delivery undone if a situation feels unsafe, and that they will be backed for it afterwards.
Keep the vehicles maintained on a schedule. Tyres, brakes, lights and mirrors are a five-minute weekly check, and a defect reporting route that does not require finding you in person.
Think about weather and footing. Most delivery injuries away from base are slips on a customer’s steps or a wet kerb, not collisions. Boots with real grip are cheap protective equipment that people will actually wear.
Address fatigue honestly. Early starts are structural in food and floral delivery, and a crew that started at 4am is measurably worse at judging risk by mid-morning.
What OSHA actually expects from a small business
Two things are commonly misunderstood here, and both matter.
First, the general duty to provide a workplace free from recognised hazards applies regardless of headcount. Small does not mean exempt. What scales with size is the paperwork: businesses with ten or fewer employees throughout the previous year are generally exempt from routinely keeping the OSHA injury and illness log, though the requirement to report a fatality or a severe injury applies to every employer.
Second, warehousing and delivery are under active enforcement attention. OSHA renewed its National Emphasis Program on Warehousing and Distribution Center Operations on 31 July 2026, replacing the 2023 directive and running five years through July 2031. The renewed program covers warehousing and distribution centres, mail and postal processing facilities, and parcel delivery and courier services, and inspections under it are comprehensive safety inspections rather than narrow ones (Fisher Phillips, retrieved 2026-09-25). The 2026 version dropped high-injury-rate retail establishments from scope and removed the mandatory heat and ergonomic screening the earlier directive required.
The practical reading for a small operator: the areas an inspector looks at first are powered industrial trucks and their operator certification, stacking and storage stability, blocked or locked exits, and hazard communication. Those are also, conveniently, the things most likely to injure someone.
Safety training that works for a team of six
Formal training programmes are built for companies with training departments. A six-person crew needs something else.
Make it short and frequent rather than long and annual. Ten minutes at the start of a shift, on one topic, beats a two-hour session in January that is forgotten by February.
Use your own incidents and near-misses as the material. “Here is what nearly happened on Tuesday and here is what we are changing” lands in a way that a generic video does not.
Write down that it happened. A single line with a date, the topic and who attended is enough, and it is the record that matters if anyone ever asks.
Make reporting near-misses safe to do. If reporting a near-miss produces blame, you stop hearing about near-misses, which are the only free information about your injuries you will ever get.
Train new starters before their first shift, not during it. The first weeks carry disproportionate risk, because a new person does not yet know which pallet always wobbles.
A weekly workplace safety checklist you can actually run
Ten minutes, same day each week, walked rather than filled in at a desk.
Floors clear, dry, and matting flat at the entrance, cold room and wash area.
Aisles and exits unobstructed, nothing stored in front of a fire door.
Stacking stable, heavy items low, nothing overhanging a shelf edge.
Lifting equipment present and working: carts, hand trucks and the pallet jack, with nothing borrowed and not returned.
Vehicle checks done for the week, defects reported and actioned.
Personal protective equipment available and in usable condition, particularly gloves and footwear.
Near-misses from the past week discussed and one thing changed as a result.
The point of the weekly cadence is not thoroughness, it is that things drift. A building that was safe in March is not automatically safe in September, because stock moved, a mat curled and a cart went missing.
Frequently asked questions
What are the most common workplace injuries in delivery and warehouse work?
Sprains and strains from manual handling lead by a wide margin, followed by slips and trips, and struck-by injuries from falling stock. Vehicle incidents are less frequent but more severe.
Does OSHA apply to a business with fewer than ten employees?
The duty to provide a workplace free from recognised hazards applies to essentially all employers. The routine injury-and-illness recordkeeping requirement generally does not apply at ten or fewer employees, but reporting a fatality or severe injury always does.
How much lifting training does a small crew need?
Less than most owners assume, because training is the weakest control. Reducing case weights, providing carts, and storing heavy items between knee and chest height prevents more injuries than technique instruction, which should come after those.
What should a weekly safety check include?
Floors and matting, clear aisles and exits, stable stacking, working lifting equipment, vehicle checks, usable protective equipment, and a short conversation about any near-misses. Walk it rather than filling in a form.
How do I keep safety rules from being ignored when the crew is behind schedule?
Fix the schedule. Rules that require staff to absorb time pressure personally are the first ones dropped, and a route or a prep timetable that only works on a perfect day is the underlying hazard.
