Safety in Manufacturing Starts with Empowered Workers

How tech helps to build a mature safety culture on the shop floor

By Andrea Masterton, VP Marketing at Poka.

In 2023 there were 326,400 non-fatal injuries at U.S. manufacturing companies. At an average of 67 lost workdays per injury, this collectively costs over 21M days of worker productivity. While the data indicates injury rates are improving, it remains imperative for employers to find ways to reduce safety incidents for legal, ethical, and business reasons. Technology can be an effective tool for promoting a strong safety culture especially among newer and younger workers.

With the industry suffering from a skilled labor shortage and 4 million jobs needing to be filled by 2030, an influx of new and younger workers will represent increased safety risk. In fact, 30% of all injuries occur during an employee’s first year. Manufacturers therefore need to go beyond safety basics and consider how to foster a workforce-centric, mature safety culture within their organizations.

Training is a pillar of any HSE program. Unfortunately, traditional training methods in classrooms are neither efficient nor effective, especially for adult learners. Formal training events done during onboarding or once per year as part of compliance training require learners to understand, retain, and recall critical safety information once back at their workstations and when the need arises. Regular audits and reporting are another important pillar of a Safety Program, but also fail to fully engage workers and achieve their intended objectives.

Connected worker apps make it easy to document and centralize safety standards in a visual format. Image courtesy of Poka.

What is a Connected Worker Platform?

A connected worker platform is a software solution that gives frontline workers access to the knowledge, skills, and support they need to perform tasks safely, and to standard. Workers can perform tasks, solve problems, collaborate with others, and learn continuously—right from the factory floor. The result is a more engaged, versatile, and autonomous workforce. The most comprehensive connected worker platforms are built by and for manufacturers, bringing together a breadth of capabilities to support the needs of frontline factory workers – as opposed to those tools built for management, departments and other salaried employees.

While the most common integrations for Poka are with CMMS, MES, LMS and QMS platforms but Poka’s robust API can link to any software, including SAP. A connected worker platform would be most suitable for equipment-driven companies ranging 2,000+ employees, operating across Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Industrial, Paper & Packaging, Building & Construction Material, and other manufacturing sectors.

How safe is your organization? The safety maturity curve can reveal the answer

Creating a strong culture around health and safety in the manufacturing industry is key. Unfortunately, many organizations are in the very early stages of maturing their safety culture. Manufacturers can measure how mature their safety culture with the Bradley Curve of Organizational Safety Maturity. A four phased model designed to measure the sophistication of an organization’s health and safety programs, procedures, and workflows, highlighting how a proactive and collective approach can help to reduce the number of incidents.

Early in an organization’s safety maturity journey, the focus is on compliance-based practices and meeting regulations – safety measures are minimal, and responses are primarily related to incidents. By contrast, a mature organization takes a more proactive, preventative approach where there is a collective responsibility. In these companies, safety is a core organizational value integrated into all levels of operations and decision-making.

Manufacturers need to ensure safety is a core business value by implementing proactive measures, continuous improvement, and employee engagement. Although a strong safety culture requires strong leadership, it is important to avoid taking a top-down mentality where safety measures are imposed, and near-misses are punished. By empowering employees to take ownership of safety, the right behavior will follow.

A connected worker platform enables workers to perform tasks and solve problems right from the factory floor. Image courtesy of Poka.

Digital tools save the day, and lives

Connected Factory Worker platforms are now table stakes in a digital factory. They give frontline workers access to continuous learning, communication, and productivity tools right at their workstation.

Connected worker apps make it easy to document and centralize safety standards in a visual format that is easy to understand, retain and access. Once set up, these one-point safety lessons can be easily accessed through a QR code – when and where they’re needed.

Beyond formal training, safety practices should be built into daily work using task checklists. A checklist is a useful job aid for critical tasks like Lock-Out-Tag-Out. Unfortunately, when these checks are done manually on paper, steps are often skipped. Digital checklists are faster to access and complete and give real-time visibility into what’s happening on the factory floor.

Similarly, inspections and audits done on paper are problematic. As team members conduct important safety checks, whether a fire extinguisher inspection or a safety walk, the purpose is to gain insights into safety risks. Data collected manually can only be analyzed when it is re-keyed into safety databases – time wasted by safety managers could certainly be put to better use.

Near-miss and safety-based observation reporting helps further reveal opportunities to take preventative action. For this reason, management should do everything possible to encourage reporting. Unfortunately, when reporting is done on paper, we see workers less inclined to submit reports because it takes time to find and complete the right form. When near-misses are submitted through a connected worker platform, notifications can be automatically sent out so action can be taken immediately. The digital audit trail also helps ensure accountability, traceability, and visibility – fostering workforce confidence the reports they submit are being actioned.

Safety benefits everyone

Investing in your safety culture is both a moral imperative and a strategic business priority. By empowering your workers in support of a safer factory floor, you will:

1. Protect your employees: When everyone is collectively empowered and responsible to promote safe work, workplace incidents and injuries go down. In fact, the companies with the most safety maturity often enjoy near-zero incidents.
2. On the right side of regulations: Manufacturers that don’t view regulations as checkbox exercises but rather meet and exceed requirements, will be the ones avoiding costly fines, sanctions, and operational disruptions.
3. Productivity: With an average of 67 lost workdays per injury, it is clear how quickly productivity can improve by preventing accidents in the first place. The skilled workforce constraints make it even more important to ensure every team member can show up to work every day and perform at their best.
4. Above all, be a good place to work: Safety has always been one of the main concerns amongst factory workers with 71% of employees stating their job is dangerous. But by adopting a tech-supported safety culture manufacturers are more attractive to potential employees and ensure current employees stay. In today’s labor shortage attracting a skilled workforce is key to maintaining high standards of quality and productivity.

Learn and repeat – meet the safety feedback loop

The value of using a comprehensive connected worker platform to engage workers in safety practices is huge. Integrating safety training delivery, skills tracking, reporting and inspections into a single, worker-centric platform helps maximize adoption creates a constant feedback loop from which the organization can improve. Workers reporting on safety observations can be used to identify training gaps and priorities. It also facilitates safety best practice sharing across shifts, lines, and sites—vastly expanding valuable safety knowledge across the entire organization at scale.