5S Housekeeping and Behavioural Safety Programs Services

Burns Bridge's has over 20 years of experience with 5S Safety programs at several manufacturing and repair locations in Canada. Further Burns Bridge also has a similar level of experience with behavioural safety programs.

In the mid-1990's many companies started to implement a behavioural approach to safety (unsafe acts). Prior to this, the primary focus was placed on unsafe conditions. Safety metrics accordingly could only be described as "random walks" with random up and down ticks in the time series graphs. Many individuals tried to convince themselves that they were having a positive impact on safety when in fact all they were observing was noise. Suggested reading: Understanding Variation The Key to Managing Chaos, Donald Wheeler

Prior to this period most jurisdictions in Canada and elsewhere contained considerable "moral hazard" which perversely encouraged an employee to get hurt or feign an accident to get time off with benefits. For example the WCB in Ontario had a retirement compensation amount of approximately $9000, for hearing impairment, in the 1980's, an amount, which was the better part of a year's wage at the time. This end of career award made it almost impossible to get senior employees to wear hearing protection. At the time, perhaps 80 percent of the compensation in the system was fraudulent.

In the mid 1990's Ontario along with many other jurisdictions brought in a system of compulsory light duty which obligated an injured employee to return to work if the employer could provide meaningful work within their limitations. Through the same period international free trade agreements such as NAFTA and others resulted in the dismantling of the Branch Plant Economy forcing companies to restructure to compete on a global basis. This removed much of labour's ability to extort annual wage increases from their employer. Over the past two decades there has been a significant reduction in private sector unionism world wide.

With the removal of both of these types of moral hazard, together with the shift to behavioural safety, which, focuses on the employee executing his/her work with safe behaviour, there has been a dramatic improvement in safety metrics everywhere with many firms achieving perfect metrics of 0 lost time accidents, 0 recordables and 0 first aid incidents.

Burns Bridge has more than 35 years of housekeeping improvement experience taking the approach that an intrinsically clean and well-organized factory is a safe factory. Since the shift to behavioural focused safety programs, Burns Bridge has achieved remarkable reductions in all metrics with a lost time accident being a rare occurrence.

Burns Bridge has extensive experience with 5S housekeeping and behavioural safety programs and can help customers address their deficiencies. Further Burns Bridge has sat on several safety committees and understands the politics, emotions and personalities which can come to play.

Burns Bridge has set up industrial plant safety programs from scratch and has written dozens and dozens of job safety instructions for topics such as lockout, fall arrest and confined space entry. Burns Bridge can help you get your safety program and injury metrics back on track.