How FCA Is Preparing Its Facilities For Employees To Return To Work

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Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), one of the largest automotive manufacturers worldwide, has established several protocols intended to keep the virus out and to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the work environment. Greg Rose, EH&S Director for FCA for all of North America, recently shared the steps his team has undertaken and communicated to employees to help ensure the safety of themselves and their colleagues. FCA has created a playbook to help employees understand all the behaviors that are essential for opening their plants and for employees returning to work. Any employee or contractor can refer to the playbook, on-demand, to reinforce what has become the “new normal” in workplace safety.

Pre-work checks are critically important at FCA. Each employee completes a COVID-19 self-check everyday before coming to work. They each take their own temperature and log it into an app before departing for work. If employees are sick, as measured by an Elevated Body Temperature (EBT), or by Influenza-Like-Illness (ILI) symptoms, they are asked to stay home. This helps keep employees with an EBT away from FCA facilities. Moreover, FCA is using thermal cameras to help identify employees with EBT as large groups of employees arrive at their work facilities.

The company has issued face masks to all employees and expects them to wear the masks at all times during work. Employees are required to maintain social distancing, both while performing their job functions as well as in their activities when taking breaks, visiting the cafeteria and the restrooms. Employees are encouraged to frequently practice personal hygiene and to sanitize their workstations regularly. Communications reinforcing these practices are highly visible throughout FCA facilities.

Furthermore, FCA has undertaken risk mitigation steps at workstations to help increase social distancing within their facilities. Barriers such as plexiglass sheets have been installed in production areas to help the company to protect its employees that are in close proximity without creating additional risk in the workstation from pinch points or trip hazards.

The company is now in the process of auditing their preparedness and validating their readiness to restart full-scale operations. Greg Rose stated, “We’ve gone from a company that makes automobiles to a company that has needed to make themselves experts in dealing with the spread of a virus.”

Pete Hadad, Manager EHS, shared FCA’s audit checklist of 92 questions along with protocols and policies that are applicable to all of FCA’s locations worldwide. FCA is utilizing SPARC, their instance of ProcessMAP’s EHS platform, to perform these audits.

The detailed audit reports are proving to be very helpful in identifying the facilities that are ready for re-opening and/or scaling to full capacity.

As multiple states within the United States, and countries globally, slowly relax restrictions to allow people to get back to work, a forward-looking company like FCA is setting the right example in taking abundant precautions to proactively protect its employees.

Kudos to Greg Rose, Pete Hadad and the entire EHS team at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles for living by the mantra – Safety First!

This blog is a part of a new series of curated content that ProcessMAP will be sharing with the larger EHS community. Watch this space for our next blog! To read our previous blog in this series, Click Here!