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How to develop an award-winning safety culture in a manufacturing setting

Minnesota metal fabricator starts with some basic safety tools and adds elements that other companies might find hard to replicate

Illustration of factory safety equipment

The recipe for an award-winning safety culture includes some basic safety tools, such as regular meetings and continuous improvement projects, but also some elements that are unique to an organization. Those are the key elements that keep the people engaged and help minimize the risk of injury at one of BTD Manufacturing's metal fabricating facility. cnythzl/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

Editor’s Note: This feature is based on a presentation made at the 14th annual FMA Safety Conference in Lakeville, Minn., on April 26, 2022.

When Anthony Kunkel talks about BTD Mfg.’s safety voyage, Lakeville, Minn., is what he considers a main point of departure. It started off in choppy seas, but as the cruise continues, people are working hard to keep everyone safe, which shows in key performance metrics today.

The time of departure on this safety voyage for BTD’s Lakeville plant was 2017. Kunkel, now the company’s director of operations, had just joined the company in the midst of incredible change. BTD was consolidating its Twin Cities-area manufacturing facilities into this former distribution hub, which meant finding places for old equipment while also adding new machine tools to the mix. In the ensuing years, the facility added a powder coating line and a large expansion for warehousing of inventoried customer parts. Back in 2017, 105 people worked at the site; in 2022, just over 370 people are now working there.

“We’ve had several tremendous years of growth, so that adds a level of complexity and creates challenges that we have to face,” Kunkel said.

One of the greatest challenges was trying to keep everyone injury free. An environment where new faces are added to the mix continually makes the effort even more difficult. That was reflected in Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recordable rates—5.33 in 2015 and 6.0 in 2016. (The OSHA recordable incident rate is a mathematical calculation that describes the number of employees per 100 full-time employees that have been involved in an OSHA-recordable injury or illness at a facility. The average incident rate for private industry employers of all sizes was 2.8 as of 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

Kunkel added that the lack of incident reports was another sign of the lax safety culture. In 2015 the Lakeville facility had only 143 reported incidents of poor safety practices and 369 in 2016. A healthy safety culture results in many more incident reports over a year’s time, and Kunkel knew that needed to improve if a robust safety culture was to emerge.

“Just reflecting on those days, I remember seeing guys that were buckling seat belts behind them because they didn’t feel like putting them on, stacking things in a way they shouldn’t have, and sticking their hands in places where they shouldn’t go,” he said. “It was a new site with a lot of new people, so we needed to make a lot of progress in a short period of time.”

As a corporation, BTD is there. It routinely applies for—and wins—Fabricators & Manufacturers Safety Awards. In fact, BTD’s Lakeville facility received the 2022 Safety Award of Honor from the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association Intl., an indicator that the facility had no recordable injuries or illnesses for 2021. Kunkel shared the “secret sauce” that has helped to create this award-winning safety culture.

The Basic Ingredients

Good sauces share similar elements with each other, like a thickening agent or a good stock. A safety program is no different, particularly as the OSHA recommends these elements to keep safety concerns in the forefront for both managers and workers alike. These are elements that you might find at any manufacturing company, and they create the foundation on which a safety culture is built.

Safety Committees. Each BTD manufacturing facility—Lakeville; Detroit Lakes, Minn.; Washington, Ill.; and Dawsonville, Ga.—has a safety committee comprised of volunteers from different departments and with diverse backgrounds. The committees meet monthly for an hour.

A whiteboard in BTD Mfg.’s Lakeville, Minn., facility is shown.

This whiteboard in BTD Mfg.’s Lakeville, Minn., facility lists the month-long blitzes that are happening in the plant. These continuous improvement activities don’t necessarily focus on safety topics, but members of the facility’s safety team are part of these efforts, which helps to make safety a priority and to create relationship with production personnel. Images: BTD Mfg.

This is not just a meeting for people to talk about frustrations and accomplishments. Participants are expected to identify areas for safety improvement and come up with plans to achieve those identified goals. Each of the committees are given two hours of project time to test out some of their ideas.

Kunkel shared an inventory management idea that came from the Lakeville team. The aisles in the warehouse are tight, only about 7 ft. between shelves. It’s not the safest place for inventory counters to be as they have to share those aisles with material handling equipment.

To take the human inventory auditor out of the picture, someone on the safety committee suggested using a drone. The drone could act as the eyes of the inventory auditor while flying out of the way of lift trucks.

“Now I don’t know if it’s the perfect idea to do at this time, but I thought it was a good example of some of the creative things that the safety committee members are coming up with,” Kunkel said.

Safety Training. BTD facilities have monthly training events where OSHA-required topics, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) usage and hazardous materials handling, are covered. These are done in a presentation-style format that everyone watches. A quiz is given after the presentation is completed to ensure that the individual paid attention.

Safety also is a part of continuous improvement activities, according to Kunkel. As a process or activity is put under the microscope to find waste, the participants in the lean manufacturing project also consider ways in which risk of injury is further minimized for the operations and technicians involved.

Another moment of safety training for BTD involves the dissemination of safety alerts throughout the company. For instance, Kunkel said that a safety incident report about someone driving a lift truck with empty boxes stacked up well above the truck’s mast recently was filed. This material handling faux pas is a danger to both the driver and others around him because the boxes have nothing to lean against, like the mast, and can easily fall over, even onto the lift truck driver.

A safety coordinator prepared a one-page review citing the unsafe practice and documented the steps used in safe lift truck operation. That document was then shared across all facilities and all departments, discussed in shift meetings, and placed on the nearby process improvement bulletin boards for easy reference.

Incident Reports. Kunkel said incident reports weren’t common during his early days at BTD’s Lakeville plant. In conversations with him on the shop floor, safety leads reported that they haven’t been seeing unsafe work practices; meanwhile, Kunkel said he could observe a couple just in the few seconds in which he was conversing with the safety lead. It didn’t take long for him to require that each safety lead log at least two incident reports each week.

With more vigorous reporting, management got a better window into the company’s work environment. The incident reports are logged into a software program that most managers have access to, including John Abbott, who oversees the manufacturing holdings for BTD’s parent company, Otter Tail Corp. “I can tell you that he dives into those incidents all the time,” Kunkel said, “which kind of gets into the secret sauce part of the conversation.”

An adjustable table is shown.

Adjustable tables are common sight in Lakeville facility.

Those incidents become part of safety discussions that take place at the top of the management chain and work their way down to shift meetings.

6S/Blitzes. These activities have some connection to the traditional lean manufacturing tools of 5S and kaizen blitzes, but they are not exactly the same thing at BTD, Kunkel said.

The 5S process is dedicated to organizing workspaces and processes to minimize waste. The steps are sort (remove waste items), straighten (organize what you need), shine (clean the area), standardize (create checklists and assignments), and sustain (continue these actions according to a plan). The sixth “S” is for safety and has been added to the lineup for those who perform the stress risk management in their facilities.

Typical kaizen events, or blitzes, are gatherings of employees from all aspects of a company that come together to dissect a challenge and come up with a resolution and a long-term method to ensure the improve results are sustained. These events are short-term projects but can last up to a week in some instances.

Kunkel said BTD has taken the blitz concept and formalized it into a regularly occurring opportunity to engage with the entire plant and focus on safety in a more concentrated way. Kunkel and plant managers take each department in each facility and create an agenda for the year. The safety coordinators in each facility help to guide cross-functional teams that focus on specific plant areas and brainstorm ways to improve processes and tasks.

“This stemmed from seeing our recordable incident rates go down through the years,” Kunkel said. “Once it got to a certain point where we’re below our original goals, you just can’t stop talking about safety. You can’t stop driving improvements. We needed some way to continue, and we decided that this was the platform to do that.”

What are some of the improvements that helped not only with safety, but also with productivity? Kunkel said facilities are filled with hydraulically powered tables that place workpieces at the right height for workers so they don’t have to strain when welding or working in assembly. In the Lakeville plant’s powder coating area, employees used to stand on ladders regularly to reach parts on conveyors that needed surfaces wiped down or plugs placed into openings; to avoid a potential fall, BTD fabricated its own platform so that those same employees could walk up some stairs and be in the perfect position to conduct those same activities before parts went into the booth.

Then there was the case of the lift truck falling into a covered pit. In Lakeville a pit, used for accessing certain parts of a nearby wheel-style blasting cabinet, had a piece of sheet metal covering it, but it also was marked off by yellow pillars and warning signs that told lift truck drivers to avoid driving over it. Well, one day someone missed the warnings, drove a lift truck over the cover, and watched as the cover dropped about a foot as the metal bent.

Kunkel said that some companies, because no one was injured and the sheet metal cover sort of did its job, would have pointed out that the lift truck driver had broken the rules and issued a reminder not to make the same mistake twice. He said the blitz team saw the incident as an opportunity to improve the potential hazard, so it recommended a beefier cover for the pit, which could support a lift truck should it drive over the pit again.

“This shows how much BTD values safety,” Kunkel said.

BTD fabricated a catwalk for the powder coating area.

BTD fabricated a catwalk so that personnel in the powder coating area could reach parts more easily instead of relying on ladders.

The Not-so-Secret Parts of the Secret Sauce

With the basics covered, now comes the secrets behind the sauce. Kunkel said it is a proprietary blend that has some easy-to-recognize elements that also happen to be hard to quantify. The secret is having these elements of the safety culture actually making a difference, not just mentioning them in a document hanging on a wall somewhere.

Safety From the Top Down. Kunkel again said this begins with the monthly safety call with corporation’s manufacturing leader Abbott. All the safety coordinators are on the call, and Abbott has familiarity with recent incident reports and overall safety metrics. “He preaches about, reiterates the importance of, and always shows the priority of safety. It all starts with him,” Kunkel said.

BTD President Paul Gintner has a monthly meeting with the safety coordinators of the four company facilities. Safety is obviously the topic of the meeting, but it doesn’t end there. In monthly business alignment meetings where key performance metrics are covered, safety is the first topic of conversation.

Working further down the organizational tree, daily conference calls with BTD Chief Operating Officer Bob Bradford and representatives of the BTD plants begin with discussing safety-related news. It could be metrics, improvement projects, or a noteworthy incident.

Before that daily meeting, Kunkel has a meeting with himself and plant managers where they get into the specifics. Were there any incidents recently that need to be shared at a higher level? Are there any hot topics that need to be addressed?

Even the department-level meetings, which are brief in nature and tend to focus on key metrics, start with safety. That’s then followed by quick coverage of quality, delivery, and productivity statistics.

If a noteworthy safety incident occurs, Kunkel said he’ll show up at these departmental meetings to provide the details of what happened and to assure everyone the importance of not letting it happen again.

At the end of each shift, a recap of key performance indicators is sent to a large email group. Incidents are also recorded. That is fed up to the highest levels of the company, completing the safety loop from top to bottom.

On-site Physical Therapist. BTD has an on-site physical therapist visit its facilities twice a week for four-hour periods. If an employee is having a pain of some sort, the individual can see the physical therapist instead of going to a doctor. Kunkel said oftentimes prescribed exercises and an icing regiment are all that person needs to remedy the pain.

“It’s an amazing resource and something that I recommend everyone to have on-site,” he said.

A plate cover sits atop a pit.

This plate covering the top of this pit can support the weight of a lift truck should it drive over it.

The physical therapist is available to address non-work-related pains as well. Kunkel said he injured his knee during a ski vacation and found working with the on-site physical therapist incredibly effective and convenient. The therapist gave him exercises to strengthen his knee, and he didn’t need to spend a couple of hours away from the office fighting traffic and sitting in a waiting room.

The physical therapist also has helped to implement stretching programs for some departments and has been involved in ergonomic assessments of some shop floor processes.

Engagement. “Your people have to care. They have to want to be part of the effort,” Kunkel said. “You can’t stand over their shoulder all day and make sure they’re making good decisions. They have to want to do good, to make good parts, and to be productive.”

That’s part of the reason that BTD focuses on safety. They need their people to be able to return to work tomorrow to contribute to the day’s production goals.

Kunkel said that’s why the company has spent time with positive reinforcement efforts. Providing meals and PPE to employees are examples. But it also calls for doling out disciplinary penalties when necessary and ultimately letting people go if they aren’t supportive of company-wide initiatives.

“Engagement is probably one of the biggest things that you can’t really quantify, but you have to keep working on it—all the time,” Kunkel said.

Turnover is one area to look at. In 2020 BTD saw a 16.2% turnover in employees, almost half of what it was in 2016. That turnover rate jumped up to 36.7% in 2021, but that was when the labor market really began to swing the way of employees, not so much for employers. Kunkel said BTD was able to meet its staffing needs, but it required quite a bit of work. The 2021 rate was still below the turnover rates of 2014 and 2015.

Hands-on Experience. Kunkel said BTD has something he hasn’t seen at other places he’s worked. The company values experience and isn’t afraid to promote its own into leadership roles.

“This is the first place that I’ve been that really preaches it and owns it,” he said. “There’s a lot of value in it.”

As an example, he pointed to Gintner, who was trained to be a toolmaker and now is BTD president. He also was employee No. 6 for the company when it was Bismarck Tool & Die. He’s done and seen a lot during his almost 37-year career with BTD.

“I can see the other safety coordinators nodding their heads when he’s talking because they know that he started on the floor,” Kunkel said. “He’s not just saying stuff to say it. He knows what they are going through.”

A vast majority of the manufacturing leaders for the BTD plants came from the shop floor. When people see that happen to others that were once operators, they begin to see possible paths for themselves, Kunkel said. That is as big a tool to promote engaged behavior as anything.

For those that might not see themselves as leaders, they are being watched by others. BTD management is active in talking with those employees about possible career paths and in encouraging people to consider opportunities, sometimes even arranging training to put those somewhat reluctant individuals in a position where they can display their hidden talents.

The hands-on experience takes on a whole other meaning when the discussion turns to salaried staff helping the shop floor during incredibly busy times of the year. Kunkel said that Lakeville’s salaried employees logged 4,000 hours supporting manufacturing activities in 2021.

When people leave the offices to help, Kunkel joked that it’s inevitable that their shop floor colleagues are going to direct them to the most challenging jobs. The joke quickly turns into a learning experience for some.

Kunkel recalled working at a press brake with unitized tooling for a punching job involving a 20-lb. extruded workpiece. The task called for punching 20 holes, which was challenging enough, but the unitized punch tooling was top locating. There was a reason that no one wanted to do that job.

Kunkel reached out to the engineering team, and they developed a stamping tool to knock out those 20 holes in the extrusion. If he hadn’t been asked to do that job, Kunkel said that he doubts anyone would have pushed for change in that holemaking process.

“There is nothing proprietary about all of this, but this is what has led us to have the results we’re now experiencing,” Kunkel said.

About the Author
The Fabricator

Dan Davis

Editor-in-Chief

2135 Point Blvd.

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8281

Dan Davis is editor-in-chief of The Fabricator, the industry's most widely circulated metal fabricating magazine, and its sister publications, The Tube & Pipe Journal and The Welder. He has been with the publications since April 2002.