Safety is all about putting people first. Yes, the impact of safety issues in the manufacturing sector can be substantial from a compliance, cost and reputation perspective—but even worse is the cost to staff wellbeing.
Alex Leclerc, CEO, Poka
It’s estimated that loss in productivity and medical, legal, and workers’ compensation expenses cost U.S. businesses billions of dollars each year. And that’s without adding in the expense of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violation that can cost nearly $150,000 per citation.
But worse still is the impact of any incidents on worker health and safety. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, both workplace injuries and illnesses were up nearly 8% between 2021 and 2022.
And there are few jobs where the safety risks are higher than on the manufacturing shop floor. Vigilance and continuous improvement are essential.
Safety Culture can be measured by the Bradley Curve
The relationship of accidents to organizational culture is well documented.
The Bradley Curve, a much-respected model that enables a company to build a safety culture within a workforce, can deliver lasting reductions in accident rates. It measures a company’s workplace safety and operational performance in four stages: Reactive (Natural Instinct), Dependent (Supervision/Rules), Independent (Self Responsibility), and Interdependent (Teams/Shared Responsibility).
Workplace accidents decline as companies move from a reactive position to a highly proactive approach—where employees value their company’s occupational health and safety culture and take responsibility to reduce workplace accidents.
Furthermore, given the industry’s reputation as a potentially dangerous profession, reducing workplace accidents is important in changing the narrative around manufacturing and making it an attractive career choice. So, the need to build such an occupational safety culture in the manufacturing industry is paramount.
Talent attrition and new tech compounds safety issues
But the current skills shortages and high turnover ratio of new staff in a manufacturing business add a further dimension to be considered. It’s easy to see how new and inexperienced employees can feel anxious, scared and daunted when left to their own devices on the factory floor—particularly on second or third shifts where there are less staff members working.
Already we are seeing new technology, automation and machinery entering the factory floor and this, according to EY, requires a digitally-led approach to bringing safety into everyday operations. EY argues that “in a transformed workplace, with new ways of working and new measures of employee well-being, we need to rethink our existing EHS models and their application. This means taking the best of what we know works and augmenting it to meet the realities of digital business models.”
Building on top of this, a digital-first approach is an opportunity to mitigate chronic productivity issues and stand out from the competition with a more empowered workforce.
How to foster a connected worker safety culture – and scale it
Technologies like connected worker platforms can go beyond formal safety training and give frontline workers access to the knowledge, skills and support they need to perform tasks safely and to standard—including easy access to safety training, checklists, reporting, and reminders. Management meanwhile can react faster to address any safety gaps with actionable, real-time insight. More than that, a connected worker platform supports the 70:20:10 model for learning and development—where 70% of learning happens on the job, 20% of learning happens through colleagues and 10% via formal training. It all helps build tacit knowledge within the frontline work force.
This model is the perfect fit to promote a culture of safety across a manufacturing workforce—prioritizing strong social collaboration between colleagues to share insights and best practices that drive continuous improvement.
The Poka connected worker platform is renowned for helping companies around the world create a culture that is safety aware and empowered to mitigate the risks highlighted here—and beyond.
Three core connected worker safety benefits
A connected worker platform helps balance safety focuses across training, compliance, and work execution:
TRAINING
- Give connected workers easy access to safety training, checklists, reporting and reminders: management can react faster with actionable, real-time insight.
- Standardize safety training: improve worker comprehension and retention of critical safety training by using one-point-lessons and video-based work instructions.
COMPLIANCE
- Track and oversee safety certifications: safety skills are automatically assigned and tracked in Poka. Leaders have greater visibility into training gaps and can better plan training activities. With a complete audit trail of exam attempts, content versioning and timestamps, you will sail through your next audit.
WORK EXECUTION
- Ensure safety standards are followed: workers use checklists to perform critical tasks, ensuring safety standards are followed and deviations are quickly identified, reported, and actioned.
Learn and repeat – meet the safety feedback loop
The payoff from using a connected worker platform that encompasses safety on both a daily management and learning & development side is huge, because it creates a constant feedback loop.
First, workers can share their frontline safety experience into the app, and this can be fed back into training approaches.
Second, it means insights that might come from an experienced worker in one factory site can be shared to other sites—vastly expanding valuable safety changes or updates across the entire organization at scale.
Let the users speak
Poka customers are making huge safety gains from their connected workforce applications, Soprema shared that it is 20% faster to report near-misses now compared to on paper, which is leading to an increase in reporting and visibility into risks.
If you’d like to find out how Poka can deliver continuous safety improvement in your manufacturing operations, get in touch with us now.
And not to be missed—IFS and Poka are running a series of webinars which will include a focus on safety and compliance. While these sessions are suitable for all manufacturing practitioners and leaders, we’ve segmented them for: Production & Operations, Continuous Improvement and Learning & Development. We will see you there!
