Whether you are in charge of health and safety, environmental compliance or quality, a checklist is a powerful tool to measure the situation your company is in. But what to measure in these checklists? Especially since the manufacturing environment differs from any other environments.
As defined by Kim Shepard, the 5 Ps include getting the right people and knowing how to engage them proactively. This is relevant to any industry and company operating with employees. In this blog post I have defined the Ps according to the industry.
In manufacturing facilities, the people should always come first. If you don’t recruit the right people for the job, you may end up with employees who violate the legislations on health and safety because they don’t know how important it is. It is also extremely important that you take time to educate your employees. Most work related accidents in manufacturing facilities are due to the lack of education on how to prevent the accidents in the first place.
In your checklist, make sure that you have points regarding the motivation, education and ability to learn when you hire new employees. And for education make sure to cover points such as the legislation on OHS, the company’s own safety rules, as well as how to work with the equipment in your facility and how to take the right safety precautions. You should care about your employees. If they get into an accident or die, the costs will be much higher for your company than having a proper education day for your employees.
The training of your people reflects on the performance of the maintenance of the manufacturing facility. The better trained they are, the more efficient maintenance processes will be.
You will find that performance and process are closely interlinked. With efficient performance, comes smoother and safer processes, which enables you to fulfil customer expectations and foster satisfaction internal and externally of your company. A great way to monitor the processes is having employees fill in a daily 5S checklist on a mobile device. There will be a blog post on how to work with 5S during the next week.
The purpose is perhaps the most important P. Include purpose in everything that you do. If you want your people to perform well and have efficient processes, you need to give them a purpose to do so. This purpose is connected with why they were chosen to work for the company, and the mission and vision of the company. Once everyone in your organisation has their own purpose, you will find that work is done faster, more cost efficient and better.
You might experience a growing profit from improving the first 4 Ps. Profit is many times interlinked with the satisfaction, purpose and performance of employees. Happy employees, who feel safe, will naturally do their part to grow the company financially. You may also find that your company’s expenses on employee accidents will go down as well minimise waste of time, resources and produce.
In addition to the 5 Ps, there are a few practical details that you might want to include to ensure safety and wellbeing of your employees and continuous growth of the company.
Make sure to include a proper and detailed check of all machines and equipment you have in the facility. All it takes to violate and damage manufactured goods is 1 error. This is an error that could end up costing your company a lot of money. Set rules for how to use equipment responsibly and add it to your checklist to inspect if whether is has been used and cleaned correctly.
Make sure to have the right signs and exits setup in case of an emergency. Follow safety protocols and make sure tall your employees know what to do in case of an emergency. Add safety measures to your checklist.
A healthy work environment is essential in order to ensure compliance with legislations, as well as avoiding the costs connected to the work inflicted illnesses and injuries. The WHO has taken initiatives in order to secure better, safer and healthier work environments. If you are looking for examples on how to implement work environment checks into your checklists, have a look at WHO’s Workplace health promotion.
Now that you got your check points you can start making your checklists for your safety walks. Now, what you may think is that having the checklists tangible on a piece of paper might be the best option.
However, with the increase of digitalisation more and more people are mobile, and that also counts for your employees. The biggest challenge you are facing with these checklists is to make easy to use and accessible everywhere at any time. I recommend that you look at a SaaS solution for this.
Prioritising your employees’ health and wellbeing is the key to maintain a proper manufacturing facility, and will be an aid to better customer service as a result. By prioritising the people who work for you, you get to save a lot of money that would have otherwise been spent on covering damages provided by work related accidents. To help you navigate in observations and reports made, it is recommended that you implement a digital checklist (checktech) from a SaaS solution. In that way everyone in your organisation can access the reports and checklist, wherever they are, and whenever they need to.
The SaaS checklist will help you stay in compliance with legislations made inside of Facility Management and OHS. But do stay informed on the legislation of your country, as it may change.
If you wan't to read how the VUCA framework also effects modern HSEQ professions, tune in for our blog series about the subject: VUCA - The beginning.
For more material on what to look out for in Safety Management, download The Ultimate Guide To Safety KPIs for FREE:
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