Worker Safety: Processors Still Need to Ramp Up Effort
To food & beverage processors, the goal of protecting the workforce should be paramount. Several processors have gone to great lengths in recent decades to enhance worker safety efforts, no matter the additional challenges technological advancement have thrown their way.
Yet, the industry still has plenty of work to do to ensure every worker makes it through their shift and heads home safely every single day.
On the plant floor, automation clearly offers a wide variety of innovative outcomes for processors, but it also has created new considerations in the realm of worker safety, says Darryl Burgess, director of global environmental, health & safety for Rich Products.
“Overall, automation has had a positive impact on associate safety. Many robotic applications are equipped with safety mechanisms, like guarding and sensors, that prevent unnecessary exposure, paired with secondary interlocks that provide an adder layer of protection,” he explains.
“At the same time, these automated systems put renewed focus on the importance of basic safety protocols, like personal protective equipment and locking/tagging out, to further protect associates.”
The same risk-reward profile applies to the poultry processing industry, where cutting up birds previously was a manual task, due to the geometric variance of the individual birds coming down the lines. Today, automation has improved enough that it can make the slight adjustments needed to maximize the yield of meat being removed from the carcass, says Reggie McLee, vice president of safety & health at Wayne-Sanderson Farms.
“Through automation, we're eliminating some of the harder work and moving people into other areas where we need it,” he says. “With the automation, though, comes new skills that are necessary for maintenance and servicing of that equipment.”
Indeed, as innovation drives changes on the process floor, new risks emerge, and safety teams need to be prepared to address them as they arise, explains Bill Remy, CEO of TBM Consulting Group, an operations and supply chain consultancy headquartered in Raleigh, N.C.
“Due to the influx of automation, the equipment used in food and beverage manufacturing has not only become more complex, but also more dangerous due to higher speeds and more intricate controls,” he says. “These changes drive the need for even more adherence to safety practices.”
Solutions in action
To communicate the importance of safety to its workforce and reinforce it as part of a daily routine, Rich’s takes a behavioral-based approach, establishing safety as a foundational activity across all its improvement systems, Burgess says.
“This approach includes the basics of any good safety program, such as policies, protocols, standard operating procedure, audits, etc., but also empowers our associates to identify activities that could be deemed ‘at risk’ or ‘unsafe,’” he explains.
“The approach helps to identify both safe and unsafe observations each week, allowing our team to evaluate and share any ‘at risk’ behaviors across our global operations, providing a strong coaching tool that enables us to better prevent safety incidents and protect our associates.”
Wayne-Sanderson, meanwhile, has created a safety matrix that lists all worker safety activities required of plant supervisors, from training to inspections and audits, against which those supervisors are scored on a daily and weekly basis. Those scores are sent to the plant superintendents and plant managers, who can then discuss any anomalies or adjustments that need to be made without waiting for a monthly or quarterly report — when it might be too late.
“We see the results and make them visible at a high level to influence compliance,” McLee says. “Rather than waiting for a lagging indicator when we get to the end of the year, we can act on it through the matrix and adjust to different activities leading to a better result.”
Additionally, Wayne-Sanderson addresses issues head-on at the highest level through its zero-accident culture, McLee adds.
“People tend to look at things in hindsight and find they could have done something differently to prevent an incident,” he says. “Our zero-accident culture means having managers, supervisors and employees take a look at the incidents that could happen and then manage as if it was an accident in advance.”
Part of this anticipatory approach includes getting employees to buy in on the importance of worker safety. Even the smallest gesture, such as having employees sign a “zero-accident culture” banner that is hung on the wall at their facility makes a difference, McLee says.
“People perpetuate [the culture] by discussing it, and the activities we put on create a mindset that we're chasing that goal all the time,” he says. “We like to keep a lot of energy around our zero-accident culture.”
Should any incidents occur, McLee says, operations will report on them during a weekly leadership conference call, sharing the details, the follow-up investigation and the corrective actions being undertaken to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future.
Wayne-Sanderson also focuses on employee health and wellness with regard to ergonomics. McLee compliments the company’s staff of registered nurses (RNs) at its facilities for helping employees avoid many of the repetitive-motion and early muscular fatigue that can chase many newer ones away.
“I like to think of our workers as industrial athletes,” McLee says. “If you take a look at all the movements when you walk through a plant, it's somewhat mesmerizing.”
Wayne-Sanderson’s RNs are there to help new workers understand that it takes more than a couple days to ramp up their bodies to the rigorous tasks they often face.
“We’ve put a lot of effort toward ensuring that we have good, experienced RNs in our plants,” McLee says. The nurses take the time to educate, encourage and offer a level of direct care for the employees, which helps them avoid a potentially unnecessary doctor’s or hospital visit — saving them and the company both time and money.
Training and maintaining
When it comes to training — both initial and ongoing — Rich’s pushes for employee engagement, keeping their skills and knowledge sharp without burning them out on information.
“[We empower] our associates to get involved — whether it’s on safety committees or participating in localized safety audits,” Burgess says. “We also conduct a series of ongoing safety activities, including daily safety checklists, behavior-based safety observations, daily line meetings and more to keep safety top of mind.
“Additionally, safety training is broken down into weekly topics, so associates are not overloaded and are able to retain the information,” he adds. Another challenge the industry faces as a whole, Remy adds, comes from the new generation hitting the workforce and its lack of manufacturing experience in general.
“Many new workforce entrants do not come from an industrial background, so there is a more critical need for safety training during the onboarding process — as well as ongoing training,” Remy says.
Rich’s, for one, offers more hands-on training on machinery to help negate that lack of experience. Furthermore, the company puts new workers through training on standard safety policies and procedures, but also safety orientations, job shadowing and “on-the-job” mentoring. In-classroom training sessions also require a more advanced approach than they did a decade ago, Burgess says.
“The days of relying solely on PowerPoint presentations and safety lectures are behind us,” he says. “To effectively engage associates, we use a third-party training solution that offers interactive videos that require active participation to ensure comprehension.”
Remy says the message to all employees must be that safety always comes first, that it is woven into the fabric of the work culture.
“It’s important to continually emphasize the responsibility we all have to each other to be safe,” he says. “Never overlook an unsafe act or unsafe condition. Leadership must set this expectation — and walk the talk.”
