The manual handling course isn’t the fix

Somebody tweaks their back on the shop floor, and I can tell you what happens next in most firms because I’ve watched it plenty of times. Everyone gets booked on a manual handling course. Half a day, bend your knees, keep the load close, all documented. Then everyone goes back to lifting exactly the same stuff, in the same awkward corners, off the same low pallets as before.

What the course can’t do

I’ve nothing against manual handling training. Done well, it’s worth having. But a course teaches someone to lift a sensible load in a sensible way. It can’t make a 25 kilo bag lighter, and it can’t raise a pallet off the floor or put handles on a box that never had any. If the job itself is the problem, training people to cope with it isn’t a fix. It’s a coping strategy with a certificate.

The giveaway is when the same strains keep coming back after the training. That’s not people forgetting what they learned. That’s the job overpowering the technique, shift after shift, until something gives. And it’s usually a back that gives, not the process.

Start with the load, not the lifter

The better question costs nothing to ask: why is anyone lifting this at all? Follow the thing that gets carried. Where does it land when it arrives? Where does it need to end up? How many pairs of hands move it in between? Walk a product round most factories and you’ll count more lifts than anyone expects, and half of them only exist because of where things happen to get put down.

Then work at it. Sometimes the lift can go altogether: a different pack size from your supplier, a pallet at bench height instead of on the floor, a trolley that turns a carry into a push. If it can’t go, make it smaller or easier, and move the racking so the heavy stuff lives at waist height instead of on the bottom shelf. Train the technique for whatever lifting is genuinely left after that. Training is what you do about the lifts you can’t design out. It’s not a substitute for designing them out.

And the daft thing is the fixes are often cheaper than the course. A decent trolley is bought once. A bad back costs you for months, once you count the time off and whoever’s covering for it.

If lifting’s a sore point in your place, pick the job people moan about most and walk it end to end. Where does the load start, who picks it up, how far does it travel, and what’s it sitting on at either end. You’ll nearly always find two or three things you can change by Friday without anybody sitting through a course. And the people doing the job will have told you most of them before you’re halfway round, because they’ve been working round that load for years and they know exactly where it hurts.