Owens Corning Customer Journey
Owens Corning integrated COVE’s Visual Literacy principles into its established safety program, helping employees identify hazards more thoroughly, recognize critical risks, and make better-informed decisions.
Recognizing unsafe conditions is at the heart of fixing them.
Your workers might be missing 90% of the picture, and you might be too!
SITUATION
In 2015 Owens Corning and the Toledo Museum of Art, now COVE, made a connection between the science of seeing art and the hazard recognition practices of industry, which is poised to have a major impact on the world of safety.
The museum has been at the forefront of art education for decades. Using a methodology called Visual Literacy, the museum has taught people to see the same way we teach people to speak, read and count. This structured approach has been used to teach thousands of people in recent years. And now, this ‘science of seeing art’ can be applied to a common problem — how to see safety.
The leap was the realization that our expertise could be applied to a major challenge in industry — safety. This innovation has led to the Museum creating COVE: Center of Visual Expertise. COVE has developed techniques to help in Seeing the Whole PICTURE® — to fully understand and appreciate the visual objects or scenes the observer is taking in.
Starting in 2015, TMA partnered with Owens Corning to test the application of Visual Literacy to the problems organizations face in their safety programs and we have seen remarkable success. Now, several major organizations — leaders in the field of workplace safety — are applying our techniques to make their workplaces safer.
SOLUTION
Owens Corning focused their initial work on how Visual Literacy might help improve hazard recognition and mitigation. This was a critical initiative for Owens Corning, whose safety team had identified a number of gaps in the effectiveness of their existing program.
RESULTS
Over the course of several months Owens Corning worked with us to adapt our existing training curriculum and trained almost 900 Owens Corning staff in a hazard recognition and control program that integrated Visual Literacy. The program was remarkably successful, with measurable improvements such as:
More stop-work orders filed
More hazards identified, near miss reports entered
Better prioritization of action planning
Improved Job-safety Analysis reports
Trained almost 900 Owens Corning staff in a hazard recognition and control program that integrated Visual Literacy.
So What is Visual Literacy?
At its core it’s a series of training modules to help organizations teach their staff to read visual information, analyze correctly, and act (fig. 01).
Owens Corning embedded the concepts into its Hazard Recognition and Control 2.0 program. The training teaches employees to look for the critical elements of risk in their operating environment, enhancing their skills seeing and identifying hazards more thoroughly, analyzing what they are seeing and making better informed decisions about appropriate action.
The program has been a vital part of the Owens Corning safety program and injury reduction goals. The training program is for all employees but is especially valuable in engaging front line operations staff. The fact it is a little ‘different’ to other safety training has helped generate enormous enthusiasm.
Furthermore, staff have been able to take what they have learned home with them, extending the impact of the program well beyond the Owens Corning factory gates.
FIGURE 01
VISUAL LITERACY TRAINING MODULES
Read visual information
See fully what is in front of you. It provides a Visual Language that teams and coworkers can use to analyze visual data.
Analyze correctly
The techniques learners develop help them comprehend visual complexity, properly interpret and assess the situation or problem they face.
Take action
By unifying what you see into one overall accurate picture of the risk, the potential consequence and appropriate action. The changes you make because you have seen.