Creating a COVID-19 Action Plan - A Case Study with Johns Manville
In the beginning of February, Proxxi had the opportunity to chat with Casey McClain, Senior EHS Specialist, and Lyndsy Malark, Pandemic Coordinator, at Johns Manville’s Plattsburgh, New York facility. We discussed how they have been managing health and safety measures over the last year in their upper New York State manufacturing facility.
Johns Manville is a leading manufacturer and marketer of premium-quality insulation, engineered products and commercial roofing used in commercial, industrial, and residential applications. A proud member of the Berkshire Hathaway family of companies, they serve customers in more than 80 countries around the globe. In March of 2020, the company created a high-level plan to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic as the world began to see increased infection rates. Following that, they created a specific COVID-19 Action Plan for their Upper New York State plant.
Designing a COVID-19 Action Plan
The COVID-19 Action Plan included policy changes, such as the implementation of protective measures and face coverings, guidance for social distancing, cleaning and disinfecting protocols, maximum occupancy requirements, ingress/egress controls, and visitor agreements.
Once these tools and processes were put into place, they began searching for a contact tracing tool to help workers feel comfortable at work and improve organizational processes. Reviewing processes became more urgent when the CDC revised the close contact definition to include cumulative time over a 24-hour period, which can be difficult to manually estimate.
Implementing Proxxi Contact
Johns Manville opted to begin by testing 10 Proxxi Contact Wristbands at their New York State facility. This trial proved to be eye opening as it was the contact tracing data generated by Proxxi Contact that allowed them to successfully identify activities that had the potential to lead to close contact should someone become infected and revise processes to limit that activity.
Additionally, Johns Manville ran a comparison during the trial phase. This comparison found that those workers wearing a Proxxi Contact Wristband were more mindful of their distance to other workers and maintained distance better than those without the wristbands. This increased distance also helped lower the risk of any COVID-19 transmission within the plant.
Once the Proxxi Contact solution was fully deployed, Johns Manville found that the use of the contact tracing data in the Proxxi Contact Dashboard quickly eliminated those that were NOT in danger. This meant that in the case of a worker testing positive, Johns Manville’s health and safety team could quickly complete contact tracing. Today, this “usable data” allows for lightning fast analysis when compared to manual contact tracing.
As we have discussed in this previous case study, companies that design their Worker Safety Programs with
Engineering
Policies
Performance
integrated in their plans have a greater success rate of business continuity and worker peace of mind.
Johns Manville employed this same framework and attention to detail in developing their workplace safety plan, and as such have had much greater success than organizations that do not follow the same process.