The Lumper Trainer, a position worth looking at again

Warehouse and Operations as a Career

Another month is wrapping up folks! We appreciate you stopping in with us again today! I’m Marty with Warehouse and Operations as a Career. We’ve had several questions lately about the front line management positions so I thought we’d talk about what those positions are and maybe I can share a few of the pros and cons of them with you. At least maybe answer a few of those questions!

So last week I helped put together a Lumper or unloader training program. As we’ve learned, in a distribution facility everything starts there, with the inbound freight so what better place to start!

An Unloader or Lumper Trainer, although not a front line management position, carries a lot of responsibility with it. As a trainer we have rules, procedures and reporting that have to be followed and completed before the job is really done. Training is expensive, did you know that just onboarding an associate to the stage of interviewing can cost your employer over $200 for each associate. A new employee is hired, and there excited about their new job. As a trainer it’s important that their given every chance and opportunity to succeed. Our company is counting on us as well as the new associate and his or her family!

Let’s look at a few of those responsibilities a lumper trainer will coach and instruct too for a minute.

Actually, if your presently an unloader you’re doing almost all of this already. It’s your normal day to day activities, there just second nature to us. Now all we have to do is make them second nature to others. I mean someone taught you right?

An important step, and it needs to be your first piece as a trainer, is to welcome a new associate to the team. Usually HR and our supervisor will cover our Company Orientation & Site orientation with them and then bring the new unloader over to us and get them introduced to their trainer. Remember how you may have felt a bit anxious on your first day? Maybe they’ve never seen a 800,000 sq ft warehouse or never dreamed of unloading 90k cases or breaking them down to 2500 pallets before. Well, its our job to ease those concerns and as a trainer we can do that!

Next we’ll want to, and we’ll do this throughout this first day, slowly and just as things comes up, but we’ll want to talk about and explain:

Scope of work and setting expectations – tell them about the task, Introduce them to any equipment they’ll be using and When/How to Use the Equipment – Make sure they know the companies rules and to never touch anything they have not been trained and certified on. Next we’ll go over the lumping process – Impact and Risk Assessment. Cases/Units/Splits Re-stacks; – we’ll need to explain all these. That may be extra revenue for the company and sometimes more money in his or her pockets!, Identifying Bad Wood is important as an unloader, we never want to put a weak pallet up in the racks. Double Stacks & Pin wheeled loads will need to be explained. – Another important part of training a new boot is we need to make sure they know how they’re getting paid, hourly rates or some type of piece rate, maybe even by the load. We’ll need to go over the attendance & tardy rules too. Maybe most importantly we’ll need to make sure they understand the safety & best practices of the job and how to read and interpret the paperwork. Any required PPE’s and the proper footwear requirements. What else, lets see, oh, they’ll probably need to know how to read our Purchase Orders, and understand how to use our dock space efficiently. And of course we’ll have to teach them to identify the Product ID, PO #, and TI-Hi’s. Unloading is a productivity position of course so a strong sense of urgency and speed or staying busy is going to be a must. I almost forgot about watching for mixed Pallets and Damaged Products Reporting Incidents /accidents and our near miss programs, proper communication, cleaning our work areas up, floor loads, logistics, Non-logistics identifiers and the expectations there going to be held accountable for. It sounds like a lot when you’re just talking about it but it’s the job. We just understand it all because we’ve been doing it for a while.

And then at the end of the day we’ll want to review the day with our trainee, kind of a Trainee takeaway. During the training process we’ll probably have the trainee, and ourselves, fill out some observation sheets, just so we can track our progress and recognize what we’ll want to review again tomorrow!

Training is repetition, the more we hear something or are shown something, the more we understand it. Remember this is a productivity job so although we’ll be reviewing a lot of information each day, staying busy, accurate and safe is what will make us the money! Review everything from day one on day two. We’ll need to make sure they understand the different kinds of unloading, breakdown, rolloffs and floor loads, Unloading inside the trailer vs outside the trailer and how to stage product on the docks.

On day 3 we’re going to review what we learned on day’s 1 & 2. By Day 3 we should know if the candidate is going to catch on or not. As a trainer we should be communicating closely with our supervisor on the candidates progress each day. Now, we’ll need to make sure we’ve done our absolute best regarding training, but productivity is a must with this position. Be sure to impress that upon your trainee.

Day 4 is a critical day for us. By now we’ve committed to ourselves that the employee has what it’s going to take to do the job. Throughout the day as we’re working we’ll review the procedures of the job and expand on its expectations and the safety practices. They should be pretty much working on their own now. Again, that’s our task at hand. If we’re visiting with them for just like 10 minutes at the end of the day and talking about our observations, not an hour long report, but just a conversation, we’ll know what we need to work on tomorrow!

Day 5, we should be on the home stretch now. We may have 2 or 3 other trainees by this point so it’s important that we’re checking in with whoever we have partnered him or her with to find out how there doing. Communicate daily with your trainees. You want them to succeed! If they succeed you succeed right?

Today we’ll meet with our supervisor with our honest recommendations, are they ready to work alone? Do they need just another day or two with another associate? We’ll be using our short 10 minute observations to ascertain that kind of info.

I’ve always felt like any type of trainer position is a great step towards our first lead or management position. We’re going to be exposed to a little reporting and we’ll have some responsibilities thrown at us and we’ll be exposed to having others looking to us for answers. I remember my first position as a trainer. I was assigned counting shorts and misships, the warehouse side of inventory control, those kinds of things. Anyway, the finance department had hired an additional cycle counter and they needed her trained on the system and how to do all the paperwork, so I drew the short straw to show her the ropes. I discovered training someone wasn’t all that bad. It’s a really good feeling when you know you’ve helped others with their career and taught them the right way!

So before we wrap up today I wanted to share a few attributes a good trainer needs to possess. Patience – we’ll be dealing with every skill level and every attitude under the sun. We can make anyone successful though! We’ll need to be a subject matter expert, we’ll need to understand all facets of the task we’re teaching too, the

why if you will! Next we need to know the importance of being a good listener. You’ll be surprised how much we can learn from our trainees just by listening to them. And lastly, we have to love what we’re doing. If we’re passionate about our task it will bleed over into theirs.

Well there’s a little on the trainer position. I know we talked about unloading today but I think you get the idea. Over the next several weeks we’ll explore a few more tasks like the different types of leads and a few supervisor positions. As you know we here at WAOC are pretty big on advancement and growth. I think we’ll have a lot of fun venturing into the front line management worlds.

And of course, as always, should you have any thoughts or comments about todays show shoot us over an email to [e-mail] and we’ll find you an answer. That little @whseandops a’ll get you answers on our Facebook and Twitter feeds as well as posting up something for discussion on the facebook group Warehouse Equipment Operators Community. We pretty much hang out there throughout the week!

Until next week, think about all the possibilities around you and I hope it goes without saying to practice Safety on every shift!