Podcast: Lessons from Fastenal on forklift, lockout/tagout, and fall protection safety

Key takeaways

Safety success goes beyond compliance—companies must exceed minimum standards to truly protect workers.
Leadership engagement and employee participation are key drivers of sustainable EHS improvements.
Fastenal’s BIG4 program targets high-impact risks: forklifts, lockout/tagout, fall protection, and trailer securement.

In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing podcast, Fastenal's Ryan Tucker and Sara Weaver share how the company has transformed and grown their workplace safety program over the past 12 years and what they’re focusing on next. A preview of Safety Leadership Conference 2025, held Oct. 20-22 in Phoenix: www.safetyleadershipconference.com.

Below is an edited excerpt from the podcast:

EHS: Fastenal is a supplier, manufacturer, and distributor of, among other things, PPE. How does that impact Fastenal’s approach to safety?

SW: So, to give a little bit of context to our organization and what we do—you’re correct, we’re an industrial distributor and we deal primarily with other businesses. So we’re in business-to-business sales. We’re typically not dealing with the average consumer like you or me. We’re dealing with other businesses, and a lot of times that has us working with companies who share the same interest we do: running safe and profitable businesses.
They look to us for products that can really be anything within the safety sector, which is very broad. That tends to be a lot of personal protective equipment, but it can include other things as well, because Fastenal’s model is really about providing services to our customers—not just products.

So we really try to partner with our customers and position ourselves as experts by providing things like audits and inspections, trainings and services, even helping develop PPE plans for them. We really establish ourselves as experts within that safety-consumer world for our partners.

And because of that, it makes them look at us differently—we have to walk the talk, right? To be an expert in the field, we have to also be a really safe company. We want to be a safe, profitable business just like our customers and stakeholders.

So what that means is we all want the same thing, but it definitely holds us to a higher level of expectation. We have to make sure that we hold ourselves to a higher standard. And it’s not just about showing that to our customers in the way we show up in their facilities every day—they really ask us to prove it.

There’s a whole aspect of the industry that people outside of it may not be familiar with: our customers use what are called third-party verifiers, and they ask us to actually prove our performance to them. This happens every single day, day in and day out. We constantly have customers reviewing our performance in different EHS areas—things like injury performance, regulatory violations, programs and processes, trainings we provide. Now, more and more, it includes sustainability programs and the ESG side of things.

Our customers are literally asking us to prove that we do the things we’re out selling them, and that we say we do. So in terms of how that changes or impacts our approach—we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard and perform at a really high level. That’s always impressed upon our goals, our objectives, and how we operate our business because of that unique aspect of how we work.

EHS: You’re presenting about Fastenal’s safety journey at the Safety Leadership Conference. Can you take me back to where Fastenal was before you started this journey, say, a decade ago?

RT: If we look back a decade—back to where Fastenal’s EHS program was—we did a relaunch of our program in 2013. At that time, we were focused on compliance-driven requirements. OSHA standards really keyed in on the occupational health and safety side, the part of protecting the employee.

Now, if we look at where we’re at, it’s more on the ESG and sustainability side, you know, security-driven standards like 14001 and 45001. But back then, we were really focused on developing and improving programs and processes that were already in place in our EHS world.

Just to give an example: at that time, we called them EHS engagements. We completed 68,000 for the year. Those engagements might have been an audit, or they might have been safety-committee driven, or maybe tied to a compliance or OSHA regulatory requirement—like completing a certain training.

Fast forward to last year, and we completed 250,000 EHS engagements. So, as we walked through and developed our processes, we really asked: once the baseline compliance requirements are met, what can we focus on next? Going forward, we put the emphasis on educating employees, educating leadership, and developing our people. That way, not only do they understand what the requirement is, but also why we’re doing it.

Another big part of that journey was leadership involvement. In some companies, or even in the past, EHS might have been looked at as something driven by just one department. But we focused on making it everyone’s responsibility—from the employee level to the EHS team, to site-level leadership, all the way up to executive leadership.

And we’ve had very good support. As you can see with the processes we’ve built and the level of involvement with the Blue Team, we’ve seen great strides.

EHS: Your presentation is titled Fastenal’s BIG4 Journey. Can you explain what those BIG4 are, and maybe what prompted Fastenal to start this program?

RT: When we look at the Big Four journey, it wasn’t just one incident or occurrence that drove it. A lot of times you’ll hear that maybe a serious incident sparked a change within a company. But really, what we looked at ties back to what I was just talking about—the focus on the employee and going beyond the compliance piece.

We looked back, and prior to that we were in compliance. We had all these programs in place. But we really dug deeper to ask: what is our exposure? And when we look at other industries, we’re not a high-hazard industry like oil and gas or mining. But within our business units, we do have internal manufacturing locations, distribution centers, our own transportation fleet with internal drivers, and then all of our retail and store employees out at customer locations and large customer facilities.

So we broke it down: what types of hazards exist, what serious incidents could occur, and what we could learn from previous trends and claims assessments. From that, we identified four categories that were our highest-impact hazards.

The first was forklift operations—powered industrial vehicles.
The second was lockout/tagout operations, which could be in manufacturing locations on equipment or in distribution centers working on automation or conveyor systems.
The third was working at heights—fall protection.
And the fourth was trailer securement.

With our own internal trucking system, we have hundreds of people inside trucks unloading them, checking, verifying, and performing quality inspections. So we put steps in place and developed detailed training requirements, with involvement from every level. We really focused on employee participation to drive those results.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.