Maintaining a comfortable routine at home, in the workplace and elsewhere is key to upholding a safe lifestyle and maintaining good health.

Seeking to encourage problem-solving and innovation, the Occupational Health and Safety team is recognizing innovative ideas through the Ergonomic Excellence Award given to those in Global Supply Chain (GSC) for improvements that are designed to overcome ergonomic hurdles at work.

A global corporate award that has received more than 40 different submissions from 30+ sites in the past year alone, the Ergonomic Excellence Award is a culmination of a year’s worth of innovation and risk reduction geared toward benefiting all involved. Jonathan Lutz, Sherwin-Williams Director of Occupational Health, described, “This year, we had several submissions that were innovative and the result of a team effort, with solutions that were developed in-house instead of buying something off the shelf. This demonstrates our strong commitment to innovation and continuous improvement.”

Each of the submissions contains one common theme: innovation. Lutz emphasized that, alongside risk reduction, a common thread through each submission was the goal of taking manual tasks – those that inherently pose ergonomic risks – and decreasing the manual aspects of each task. Because of this, individual sites and Company leadership alike have a notably increased passion for EHS and innovative risk reduction strategies.

Lutz pointed to an example submission that all types of groups, plants and locations at the Company are tasked with: stretch wrapping. When wrapping cans and other containers, “depending on how the pallet is stacked, sometimes we can maintain great neutral posture, but oftentimes it’s either too low or too high, which can increase the risk for injury,” he said. By investing in devices and tools that can be used to make this task – and many others – much safer, Lutz emphasized the genuine value that overcoming a hurdle like this can create.

“Risk reduction efforts continue to be a key component of what we do as a Company to keep people safe and healthy, and we have a number of ways that we do that,” Lutz remarked. “By working to prevent ergonomic injuries, we’re helping to keep our people safe.”

This story is featured in the Sherwin-Williams 2022 Sustainability Report.