Engineering giant Rolls-Royce has revealed the measures it has taken to keep production going at its Derby factory while ensuring the safety of its workforce.
The Government is encouraging businesses, particularly those in the manufacturing and construction sectors, to reopen in order to get the economy moving again during the coronavirus pandemic.
However, at the firm’s huge civil aerospace site at Sinfin, it has lost just one week of production since the start of the crisis.
That week of production downtime was used to assess and implement measures which could ensure hygiene and social distancing could be maintained while the production and testing of aero engines continued.
Before the crisis started, Rolls-Royce’s Derby site – and its facilities throughout the word – were all geared towards efficiency of production. Now, its workers are adjusting to new ways of working.
The firm’s own chief medical officer Dr David Roomes has worked with teams around the world to come up with a blueprint at Derby that can be put in place at Rolls-Royce sites globally.
His strategy involves a combination of changing behaviours and using spaces differently.
Dr Roomes said: “It’s about optimising our actions and behaviours in such a way as to minimise the spread.
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“Everything that we are doing is about risk reduction, not risk elimination. Social distancing and hygiene will remain the backbone of the public health strategy to limit the spread.
“These measures also form the core of our approach to enabling our people to work while minimising the spread.”
Rolls-Royce’s staff are used to working in teams – but Rolls-Royce has had to implement physical interventions to keep them distanced.
For example, in the testbed control rooms, the firm has installed physical dividers between workstations. It has also limited the amount of people in the control room during an engine test.
On the firm’s civil aerospace and defence assembly lines, portable dividers have been placed around an engine to distance workers. Staff are given inductions, which cover how they should do their job while adhering to the new measures.
Dennis Dyson, Rolls-Royce’s assembly and test director for civil aerospace, said the measures had taken some getting used to but it has been a case of building new habits.
He said: “We had to help people to embed our new normal, making it as easy as possible to put new working practices in place.
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“We’ve amended start and finish times to keep people working in different groups separate and we asked colleagues to bring their own food and drink.
“Adjusting to a two-metre distance has been interesting, but it helps that people are getting used to doing this outside of work, such as when they go to the supermarket.”
Dr Roomes said that in terms of social distancing, it is more about pragmatism and minimising the time spent close to others.
He said: “We define close contact as being within two metres of another person for 15 minutes or more.
“In some countries this is one metre or 1.5 metres. There is nothing magic about either of these numbers and it is absolutely not the case that 2.1 metres is safe and 1.9 metres is unsafe.
“It’s simply a convenient yardstick, the principle being that the further away you are from another person and the less time you spend close to them, the less likely they are to transmit coronavirus to each other if either happen to be infected.
“Passing someone in a corridor or on a staircase is not considered close contact and we need to be sensible and pragmatic in this regard.”
In its production facilities, Rolls-Royce has put in physical dividers to separate workstations.
It is also encouraging people to keep to one side in communal walkways. It has closed off communal areas such as changing rooms and is looking at how its canteens can provide packaged food for employees.
Staff are not required to wear masks, as a general rule. However, employees wear them when the task they are doing means they are within two metres of a colleague for more than 15 minutes.
Gloves are worn for tasks where they are usually worn anyway, or where people are touching the same parts repeatedly.
Meanwhile, reminders have been put up around Rolls-Royce facilities to remind workers to maintain personal hygiene levels and behaviours, such as handwashing, as well as coughing and sneezing etiquette.
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Dr Roomes said: “Given that we will be living with social distancing and new ways of working for the foreseeable future, we need people to feel safe at work.
“We are implementing measures that are sensible, pragmatic and that don’t signal that the workplace is inherently hazardous.
“How we show up when we’re in the workplace is so important. To some extent, we’re all feeling our way and as long as we always treat each other with dignity and respect, I have no doubt we will make a success of it.”