Maintaining a consistent and efficient throughput is crucial to any production facility’s bottom line. Despite the best intentions of corporations to achieve OSHA compliance and uphold workplace safety standards, production workers occasionally cut corners in order to expedite the production process.
However, as this page on osha.gov clearly indicates, workplace accidents create substantial financial burdens for businesses. Additionally, accidents resulting in serious injuries or death often produce work stoppages causing significant declines in a facility’s throughput.
So, how should businesses align the demand for rapid, efficient throughput with the need for workplace safety? Review the tips below to preserve the safety of your workers while maintaining profitable production speed.
Tip 1: Provide Secure And Efficient Safety Equipment
Acquiring the right safety equipment for your production facility goes a long way toward keeping workers safe without sacrificing throughput efficiency. When reviewing safety equipment options, focus on the intuitiveness and accessibility of the solution. Equipment requiring several steps to operate effectively slows down production speed. Whether you need a ladder or a complete safety system, make sure your safety solutions are easy for your employees to understand and operate.
Additionally, whenever possible, you should implement passive safety solutions. As noted before, “passive equipment minimizes harm with as little employee intervention as possible, so employees can’t take safety shortcuts while completing a task.” By investing in passive safety solutions, you prevent your workers from putting their safety and your efficient throughput in jeopardy.
Tip 2: Define Your Production Process With Safety In Mind
A clear, safety-minded production process helps ensure workplace safety without compromising throughput efficiency. When production managers implement and enforce clear work processes, workers do not have to waste valuable time figuring out how to complete each task.
Safety-oriented process designs take each potential safety risk and safety hazard into account. When these risks are accounted for before production begins, the resulting number of slips, trips and falls causing serious injuries and death declines, ultimately leading to increased throughput.
Tip 3: Make Sure Employees Understand How Safety Leads To Efficiency
Investing in proper safety equipment and defining safe production processes goes a long way toward achieving workplace safety in your facility. However, it’s simply not possible for production managers and safety engineers to monitor employee behavior at all times.
For this reason, you must spend time educating your facility’s employees on the connection between safety practices and throughput efficiency. Workers are much more likely to follow safety best practices when they fully understand the reasons behind them. Otherwise, they may be tempted to cut corners on production processes, thinking they are benefiting your employer with a faster method that puts safety at risk. When workers fully understand how a safety culture leads to more efficient throughput, they take fewer risks and your facility experiences fewer costly accidents.
Tip 4: Conduct Regular Safety Audits
Safety hazards such as liquid residue on a ladder or a misplaced box on a gangway greatly increase the risk of your employees experiencing slips, trips and falls. Regularly walking through your facility to identify potential hazards helps you remove these dangers.
When you’re conducting regular safety audits, it’s also very important that you review and analyze all of your fall prevention safety equipment for wear and tear. Worn-out equipment could lead to poor functionality, causing accidents and needless production delays.
If you’re not sure where to begin with acquiring quality fall prevention safety equipment and creating safe production processes, consult with a safety expert to help you define your needs and establish a robust safety culture in your facility.
Need to keep your workplace moving efficiently while meeting corporate and OSHA compliance? Click below to download this industry guide from Carbis Solutions to discover the secrets to a safer – and more efficient – work site.
