Posted by Safety Director on Thursday, January 05, 2006 at 8:13PM :
In Reply to: 4 Your Safety ----- posted by Mark S. on Thursday, January 05, 2006 at 12:38PM :
Turn on your safety consciousness
In a perfect world, the Chrysler Group would engineer out every safety hazard and the plant floor would always be a perfectly safe place for employees.
But it’s not a perfect world. Although the company is doing everything it can to minimize the potential for injuries, the plant floor can be a dangerous place for those people who let their attention slip—even for a second.
According to a leading safety advocate, a large percent of all workplace injuries happen because an employee has a momentary loss of concentration or focus.
“We’ve done a terrific job engineering out hazards and designing the workplace to be safe and healthy, and we must continue along that path. Yet we can’t forget the human elements of ensuring a safe work environment,”
said Jim Thomas, Director—Health, Safety and Medical Operations. “I can’t stress enough the need for personal accountability for safety on the job, and that’s one of the ultimate goals of the B.E.S.T. (Bringing Excellence to Safety Team) program. We have worked hard on equipment, process and
facility hazard eliminations. Now it is time for us to work on personal
hazard elimination.”
Thomas’ counterpart at the UAW, Decoris Glenn, Assistant Director of the UAW-DaimlerChrysler Department, emphasizes the need for every single person on the plant floor to be safety conscious and knowledgeable. “From the very beginnings of B.E.S.T., we knew that we would have to get in the hearts and minds of the workers. First we needed to train and obtain the commitment from the leadership, which we have done. Now it is time to get to the
workers on the floor,” Glenn said.
As Phase 2 of B.E.S.T. begins to roll out later this year, every single employee in U.S. plants will receive training on the elements of B.E.S.T. and his or her individual role in the process of taking on responsibility for safety at the worksite.
“We’ve woven in elements of safety throughout all manufacturing processes,
such as the Workplace Organization Model, Total Productive Maintenance and Smart Manufacturing,” Thomas said. “The standardized work instructions have safety rules built in, such as the proper personal protective safety equipment that is to be worn on a specific operation. Or the SWIs
themselves instruct the employee in the safe manner in which the job should be performed. We just need to get everyone to understand how important it is to perform the job as intended and to take no shortcuts.”
The next step, according to Thomas, is to “engage thousands of eyes” by training employees in how to identify a hazard and know what to do if they encounter a hazardous condition. Employees need to be able to answer these questions: What is a hazard? How do you identify it? How and to whom do you communicate it?
“As we empower employees to take accountability for their operations, safety is a logical inclusion to that model,” Glenn said. “As employees take on responsibility for their team’s performance, it is important that they understand their roles and the impact they can have in providing a
safe work environment.”
Thomas added that nobody expects all employees to become safety experts and understand the technical requirements set out in governmental regulations or company specifications. “That’s not the objective,” he said. “We just want people to help in identifying common hazards and to care for their fellow employees by talking about safety and making it a safer workplace.”