The short guide to standardizing safety and compliance in maintenance

Standardizing safety and compliance at scale is one of the most challenging things you can do as a maintenance manager. 

There are a few big reasons why it’s so difficult. It’s not only hard to communicate changes across sites, it’s also tough to enforce them. You need the right people, processes, and tools on your side to make it work. However, the payoff is worth it. Standardizing safety and compliance across multiple sites can help you reduce accidents and injuries, save money in downtime, and pass audits easily. 

In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know to roll out safety and compliance SOPs at scale.

Key takeaways

• You can create SOPs for every maintenance task, but it’s important to prioritize processes that make a critical impact on safety and compliance, like PPE requirements, LOTO procedures, and protocols for risky what-ifs.

• The more documentation and standardization you can add to compliance-related processes, the better prepared you’ll be for audits.

• Every facility’s SOP requirements are different, so asking the right questions for your operations will give you a clear picture of where to improve your SOPs.

• Continually assessing and updating your safety and compliance program is the only way to ensure your workforce stays as safe as possible.

Which maintenance tasks and processes should be standardized?

In manufacturing, where maintenance teams rely on repeated processes, regulations, and regular shift changeovers, having your processes and protocols documented should always be a top priority. 

When it comes to safety and compliance, SOPs are even more critical. It’s a game-changer to have documented checklists, processes, and workflows for the following:

• Regular equipment inspections: Documenting each step of recurring inspections ensures consistency no matter what technician does the work, which allows equipment to stay in great working order. It also creates a proof of work to give to auditors.

• PPE requirements for preventive maintenance tasks: No one wants their technicians to sustain an injury or near-miss because they weren’t properly protected during a routine PM. Creating SOPs for protective wear is a great way to build safety into even the most routine tasks

• Protocols for responding to safety-related incidents: Responding to safety events, like hazardous spills or gas leaks, can feel frantic. Make sure you have ironclad protocols in place that take every risk into account so workers can stay safe when it counts.

• Troubleshooting for equipment failures: When equipment fails, minimizing downtime is both a bottom-line and a safety concern. Providing a flowchart for technicians is a great way to ensure the right protocols are being followed safely.

• Lockout/tagout (LOTO) procedures: LOTO procedures are some of the riskiest activities your workers can be exposed to. Having the right documentation and controls in place to make sure they’re done safely is non-negotiable. 

• Any compliance-related activity that requires signoff: Any maintenance manager knows that the most stressful part of any audit is tracking down the right documentation to prove compliance. Building the necessary records and signoffs into your everyday compliance activities in the form of SOPs is a great way to eliminate that stress.

How to audit your maintenance team’s safety and compliance SOPs

Accurately assessing your facility’s current state of SOPs might feel tricky, since so much of this topic is subjective. After all, how can you be sure all the right tasks have SOPs attached to them? And how do you know the SOPs you do have are good enough to improve safety and compliance?

Ultimately, every facility has its own needs, but there are some cues that can help you figure out where you stand and what needs improvement.

If you’re looking to overhaul your SOPs, don’t reinvent the wheel. Start by looking at what you already have, then as questions like:

• Are SOPs for our riskiest activities complete? Do both veteran techs and new hires understand them? A complete SOP should include specific procedure steps, location and asset information, required parts and tools needed, and information about who’s responsible for the work.

• What’s our safety SOP attachment rate? Is this tracked regularly? Is there room for improvement?

• Are SOPs easy to find when technicians need them? Are they attached to work orders, or do people need to sift through papers or search a spreadsheet to get the information?

• How can we prove that an SOP was followed properly? If all you have to go off is your technicians’ word, it may be time to rethink your process.

• Which inspections are being carried out regularly? Are they being completed every time? Are the results properly recorded? Is there a way to prove they were completed correctly and signed off on?

• When regulations change, how do we update our SOPs? Sending out an email doesn’t guarantee that everyone will get the message. 

• Do we have controls in place to make sure our highest-risk activities can be completed as safely as possible? For example, do you have a way to attach photos, collect digital signatures, or include notes?

• Do we have a way to roll out SOPs from one facility to others? If not, your efforts to overhaul a procedure will stay siloed.

• Are we regularly reporting on non-compliance trends, missed inspections, and safety training? Any of these stats can show you where you need to increase efforts on SOPs.

Answering the questions above will give you a much better idea of where you stand with safety and compliance SOPs. You’ll be able to see both your strengths and weaknesses much more clearly, and start to develop a plan for improving your safety and compliance program overall. 

How to standardize safety and compliance SOPs in maintenance so that they stick

Creating the best SOPs you can is important. Making sure your workforce actually follows them is its own challenge. The more you can reduce friction, the better. 

Update your SOPs regularly

Creating SOPs is far from a one-and-done activity. They should be updated to reflect changes in staffing, equipment condition, regulations, and incident rates. Using an AI assistant to create SOPs can help you do this at scale. 

Make your SOPs accessible to everyone who needs them

Driving standardization across multiple sites is one of the biggest hurdles for any manufacturer trying to drive safety and compliance. A CMMS with multi-site capabilities can help you do this effectively. Creating global procedures will help you apply important SOPs to other sites quickly and effectively. 

Keep assessing progress

SOPs exist to increase knowledge sharing, safety, and compliance, so it’s important that you regularly check in on a few different markers for these metrics, such as:

• SOP fulfillment rates
• Inspection completion rates
• Error rates
• Safety completion training rates
• Incident rates

Looking at the numbers can help you be much more objective about whether your SOP efforts are a success. And if the numbers aren’t looking good, there’s always room for recourse. SOP programs fail all the time, and you can fix them by really understanding what went wrong and creating a strategy to remedy the situation. 

If you’re ready to make a real effort to overhaul your safety and compliance SOPs, book a demo to learn more about how MaintainX can help.