The Near Miss Challenge

As safety professionals, we need to deal with three different situations: near misses, first aid injuries, and recordable injuries. Where the latter two are easier to understand, the concept of a near miss may be less so. So what is a near miss? A near miss is a situation where an injury could have occurred. Near misses are the shocking points of our day where a car nearly hits us, or you dropped a plate right next to your foot. When we record near misses and take corrective actions to ensure the event will not occur again, we reduce our chance of getting injured. That being said, whenever there is a near miss in the plant, we want to know immediately and we want to fix it fast. I created a program, similar to the Safety Olympics, in which employees can fill out a form reporting just the near miss for 1 point, offering a solution for 2 points, and even going further and answering a series of why-did-this-happen questions for 3 points. Points can accumulate until a recordable injury occurs, at that time (or before at the discretion of the employee) all points must be "spent" on fun prizes, like embroidered Unilever blankets or free pint of Ben & Jerry's coupons. When employees report a near miss, I immediately record it in a spreadsheet, which I've designed to be continued far after I leave here, and then email the near miss and offered solution to all the managers, expressing the need for a quick response. So far this program is amazing. After only starting it two weeks ago, I have already had 16 entries turned in. Likewise, the response time by the managers is always within an hour and most near miss cases are closed within a week. I am so proud of this program and I am happy to have found a solution that works well for our plant. I know that this new found awareness of near misses will really reduce the hazards around us and keep our workplace safe :)

Back to Risk Assessments

In my location we are undergoing a lot of changes, both in management positions, and in improvement processes. Although most of Unilever already uses the modern system of TPM (Total Productive Maintenance), a wonderful strict guideline for really focusing on the small things and improving processes, the ice cream division of Unilever was brought closer into the company last year -previously governed under their own headquarters. That being said, when it came time to doing Focused Improvement training, a system that the co-ops are expected to work off of, my location didn't really know what to make of it. So I finally got my training when I realized I had no idea what Focused Improvement was at the Midpoint Event, I reached out to the co-op coordinator and she put me in touch with a trainer. I reviewed the decks she sent and everything makes so much more sense now! So now I'm going back over my risk assessments and putting them into legible graphs, locating exactly what needs to be targeted to improve - hence "Focused Improvement". The weird part of all of this is though, is that I know all these FI (Focused Improvement) methods that no other manager has seen, or they are just hearing about it. So it's really weird to now balance the fact that I know a lot of the modern Unilever methods of thinking that the rest of this facility is just starting to grasp. What this means for me though is that I'm looking at my work in a whole new way, it's given me a lot of insight on how to now take the data I've collected and do something with it.

A Quick Tip

Just wanted to share a quick smart tip I learned at the Midpoint Event:

Ladies, always carry an extra scarf with you when giving a presentation, now you'll have something to cover up an embarrassing spill or stain if it should happen!

Midpoint Event

On Tuesday and Wednesday I was in Connecticut, for our co-op Midpoint Event. It was a nice trip and it was great to see everyone again! It's funny how those three days of connecting in the beginning of our co-op made lasting friendships, we all continue to communicate with an instant messaging program between Unilever. At the Trumbull facility, we took a tour of research and development (R&D), which was really cool! I've always swayed away from R&D as a career, because I'm not sure if I want to be stuck in a lab all day running experiments. However, we got to see process research which was so cool! Of course they have to research how they're going to make the product on a large scale, and those researchers also get to travel a lot to plants and perform trial runs. So the idea of R&D has definitely opened back up for me. On Wednesday we traveled out to Clinton, CT, and got to tour the original Pond's factory. It was awesome! I'm so used to the ice cream world, smaller, hand packed, older, so seeing the automated lines, one even had a robot(!), was amazing! At the end of the day we practiced our presentations for the final event which will be in June. Practice most certainly makes perfect and I definitely need to get my presentation perfected for when it counts :)