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.