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.