Snack food manufacturer Frito-Lay is making good on its promise to create a “positive-impact culture,” thanks in large part to a recent material handling project at 34 of its manufacturing and distribution centers in North America. Looking for a way to reduce the risk of worker injuries from its complex manufacturing and assembly process, the company turned to wearable technology provider Kinetic for a culture-changing solution—one that has empowered workers to take greater control over the way they perform physical tasks on the job.
POSITIONING FOR HEALTH AND SAFETY
Frito-Lay’s ergonomics challenge comes down to posture: Workers are at risk for strain and sprain injuries due to the bending, lifting, and twisting actions they perform on the job. The company had used a range of traditional methods to help improve ergonomic processes, including soliciting input from athletic trainers, posture training, and workplace risk analysis. Although those solutions encouraged employees to modify the way they move, they didn’t create meaningful behavior change, company leaders said.
“We’ve always done all the traditional ergo work, but there has been something missing,” Cormac Gilligan, vice president of global environment, health, and safety at PepsiCo, Frito-Lay’s parent company, explained in a statement detailing the project. “We weren’t able to tap into that behavioral element to create a sense of ownership in the individual employee and help them behave posturally in a different way.”
Kinetic’s Reflex wearable device was just what Frito-Lay was looking for. The belt-mounted device is an always-on, continuous coaching system that alerts workers with a sensor-driven light vibration when they are bending, twisting, or reaching in an ergonomically incorrect way. The system helps employees form new habits and develop lasting behavior change—via the real-time alerts, on-screen data, gamification features, and goal and reward functions. The self-driven continuous learning system is also driving process improvements, Gilligan added.
“After receiving an alert, employees stop and think about whether there is something they could do differently. They then initiate conversations with us about why they have to adopt a high-risk posture and how we could redesign the workspace or the process,” he said. “So you’ve got culture change happening at the same time as behavior change. That is something we’ve never had before with our ergo program.”
REDUCING INJURIES, LOST WORK TIME
The improvements align with Frito-Lay’s “Beyond Zero—Pursue Positive” vision, which aims to create both an injury-free work environment and a program that boosts employees’ health and well-being. Following a five-month pilot project that yielded a 72% reduction in improper postures, the company rolled out the program in the summer of 2020 to more than 1,000 employees across 34 facilities. In the first two quarters of deployment, data from nine facilities showed a 19% reduction in strain and sprain injuries compared with the same period a year earlier as well as a reduction in lost work time due to injuries. Historically, 100% of strain and sprain injuries kept employees from doing their jobs, but that measure fell to 33% after introducing the Reflex device, company leaders said.
“We have a very transparent and proactive culture, and we’re always trying to do something different, something additional, to drive better safety performance,” Gilligan added. “When we deployed the Reflex, the results were incredibly powerful.”
