Best Practices for 2024: Driving Safety in a Changing Manufacturing Environment
In a constantly evolving manufacturing environment, fostering a culture of safety through employee engagement, data-driven analysis, interactive training and strategic automation is essential for mitigating risks and ensuring workplace safety.
- By Joel Pettit
- Aug 16, 2024
Manufacturing is a constantly evolving industry. Shifts in factory technology, growing customer demand for manufactured products across a wide variety of industries and labor shortages are creating additional stress on manufacturers. Additionally, the increased adoption of automation is changing the makeup of manufacturing, bringing with it both risks and opportunities. However, manufacturing leaders have a responsibility to ensure that high-pressure environments do not disrupt the most important consideration on the manufacturing floor: safety.
The key to driving safety in an environment with anticipated hazards is building best practices into everyday work so that good habits become ingrained in the workplace. This culture of safety takes time to build and requires commitment from everyone who comes into contact with or makes decisions about a manufacturing floor. Management must be committed to safety and encourage time to be spent on safety initiatives. Floor leaders must be committed to reinforcing good safety behaviors and pointing out bad ones, and every worker in a manufacturing environment must take responsibility for their and others’ safety. While safety programs must be customized to fit each unique environment, there are a few best practices everyone can follow.
Focused Employee Engagement
Employee engagement needs to be a key part in any successful safety program both to make sure employees are understanding safety concepts and to solicit safety improvement ideas from those who work on the manufacturing floor every day. Driving strong participation in safety committees and safety activities must be accompanied by empowering employees to identify safety concerns and potential solutions. Management must recognize that production employees are experts in their work environment and build strong relationships to support communication, training, appropriate corrective action and other safety aspects.
One way to successfully engage employees is through a “Safety Net” program. This approach breaks down the larger work environment into different areas, with rotating assessors from local teams focusing on a specific area and topic each week. These assessors record actions that need to be taken, track the closure of those actions and communicate progress with employees. These rotations help ensure that safety inspections do not become mindless and regularly bring fresh eyes to each part of the facility.
Data-Driven Analysis
It is important to encourage reporting even of minor incidents and track those incidents in a way that helps illuminate trends before they become serious concerns. This helps leaders take steps to mitigate future issues by prioritizing specific areas for improvement. Identifying the root causes of minor incidents and near-miss events can help inform injury prevention efforts, including best practice sharing between employees about certain kinds of incidents.
It is important to not only collect and analyze safety information but be transparent in sharing it with employees. Utilizing department-specific Gemba boards or installing digital dashboards around workstations to display both leading and lagging safety indicators is a good step that leaders can take to keep employees informed about safety priorities and progress.
Interactive Training
It is important to make sure that safety training is not simply a “check the box” item for both employees and visitors to the manufacturing floor. Interactive training—instead of just passive video or presented training—is a great way to encourage better understanding and adoption of safety best practices. Dedicating space to training and filling that space with interactive displays and visual aids helps immerse people in the safety concepts being discussed. It is also important to make sure to not only build safety expectations but also check for the understanding of those expectations before allowing anyone—employees or visitors—into the production environment.
Strategic Automation Deployment
In addition to behavior-based activities and robust safety program deployment, manufacturing leaders must invest in technology that helps to improve safety. This includes installing ergonomic equipment and making the right investments in automation to reduce high-repetition and high-force tasks. This type of automation helps reduce safety risks in manufacturing and warehousing environments, especially related to musculoskeletal disorders and the prevention of strains and sprains.
Before implementing any robotic or automated equipment, it is important to deploy a strong management of change program, set safety standards and communicate those standards across project teams. This includes implementing robust machine guarding, electrical safety and energy control programs to reduce risks for employees who may program, operate, diagnose, repair or routinely adjust equipment.
Safety Is Not One-Size-Fits-All
When implementing any of these ideas, it is critical to work with employees to determine how they fit into a specific manufacturing environment. While adopting some best practices is fairly straightforward, manufacturing leaders must always maintain open and honest communication about what is and isn’t working in their workplaces. Maintaining a safe working environment for all employees and visitors must be the first priority for all manufacturers, and adopting these key behaviors is a great place to start.