Your restaurants have many situations where management, maintenance, and crew members must work outside. This may include momentary tasks such as taking out garbage to the dumpster, delivering food to customer’s vehicles, to parking lot cleanup and inspection, to longer term tasks, such as maintenance of equipment, and Hand Held Order Taking. In all of these cases, your team exposes themselves to the risk of being struck by vehicles. These vehicles may be customer’s vehicles or even other crew member’s vehicles.
Preventing and reducing struck by motor vehicle accident is fairly easy, as long as you enforce these simple steps:
- Never walk between vehicles in the drive-thru
- Wear a high visibility vest when performing any outdoor task. This includes taking trash out to the dumpster.
- Ensure that lighting in the parking lot and around the building covers all areas and eliminates any dark areas.
- Enter and exit through doors with the least traffic, or restricted traffic patterns.
- Look both ways when crossing traffic patterns.
- Never bend over in front of a vehicle (such as in the drive through) to pick up any objects. Let the vehicle pass first. They may not see the crew member bend over or kneel down, and proceed forward, striking the crew member.
- Always look to the right into the drive through lane when delivering food to a vehicle. The vehicle in the lane may be checking the food bag and not look forward when letting off of the brake.
Although these injuries may not seem overly common, they tend to be serious or tragic when they do occur. Following these simple steps will help to make sure that none of your crew members will return home safe, each night.