Interview: Rethinking Hand Hygiene in Manufacturing
Rethinking Hand Hygiene in Manufacturing – From Individual Action to Process Integrity
Many manufacturers continue to treat hand hygiene as a compliance requirement. Increasingly, however, leading organizations are integrating hygiene into broader quality management and operational excellence strategies. We spoke with Konrad Pieniądz about contamination risks, process control and why leading manufacturers increasingly view hand hygiene as a quality management issue.
Many manufacturing facilities already have hygiene procedures in place. Why is hand hygiene still such an important topic?
Konrad Pieniądz:
That’s a great question because most organizations do have procedures in place.
The challenge is rarely a lack of hygiene rules. The real challenge is making sure those rules are followed consistently across different shifts, teams and production areas. In manufacturing, people interact with materials, products, equipment and shared surfaces throughout the day. Every one of those interactions creates an opportunity for contamination to move through the process. What we’re seeing more and more is that hand hygiene is no longer viewed purely as a health measure. It’s becoming part of process control.
Manufacturers are increasingly recognizing that hygiene is not just about protecting people but it’s also about protecting processes, products and quality standards.
You often describe hand hygiene as a process issue rather than a people issue. What do you mean by that?
Konrad Pieniądz:
For many years, hand hygiene was treated primarily as an individual responsibility. If compliance was low, the response was usually more training, more reminders or stricter supervision.
But people don’t work in isolation. They work within systems.
If dispensers are difficult to find, products aren’t consistently available, or hygiene steps don’t fit naturally into the workflow, even motivated and well-trained employees will struggle to follow procedures every time.
The organisations that achieve the highest levels of compliance focus less on correcting behaviour and more on removing barriers. When hygiene is built into the workflow, the right action becomes the easy action. Consistency improves, monitoring becomes simpler and standards become easier to maintain across the entire operation.
Where do you see the highest contamination risks in industrial environments?
Konrad Pieniądz:
One of the biggest misconceptions is that contamination risk exists only on the production line. In reality, many contamination events originate at transition points, where people move between areas, tasks or processes.
Production and packaging lines naturally receive significant attention because employees handle materials, products and equipment continuously throughout the day. However, some of the most overlooked risks are associated with shared touchpoints such as control panels, scanners, forklift controls, door handles, shared tools and workstation interfaces. These are the places where contamination can move between people, processes and operational zones without attracting much attention. We also see risks in quality control laboratories, warehouse operations and maintenance activities, where employees frequently move between different areas of the facility. A particularly important point is the transition between raw material handling, production and packaging.
If hygiene measures are not embedded into those transitions, contamination can travel through the process unnoticed. Manufacturers should think about contamination risk as something that follows workflow, not something that exists in a single location.
What role does infrastructure play in achieving better hygiene outcomes?
Konrad Pieniądz:
Infrastructure is often less visible than procedures, but it has a huge influence on results.
Many organisations spend considerable time developing policies and training programmes, but pay less attention to how hygiene is delivered in practice.
Simple factors such as dispenser placement, product availability, refill management and accessibility can make a significant difference. A well-designed hygiene system removes obstacles. Employees shouldn’t have to go looking for hygiene stations or interrupt their workflow to use them. When hygiene fits naturally into daily operations, consistency tends to improve without requiring constant intervention.
How should manufacturers measure the success of a hygiene programme?
Konrad Pieniądz:
One common mistake is focusing only on activities. Installing dispensers is not success. Running training sessions is not success. Those are inputs, not outcomes. The real question is whether hygiene has become a routine and reliable part of daily operations.
Like any critical process, hygiene should be supported by meaningful indicators. Depending on the environment, manufacturers may track audit observations, product availability, refill frequency, contamination-related incidents, non-conformance reports and corrective actions linked to hygiene failures. The strongest programmes generate evidence that controls are working in practice, not simply that procedures exist on paper. What gets measured gets managed. The more visibility organizations have into hygiene performance, the easier it becomes to identify gaps before they become quality issues.
How does hand hygiene contribute to operational resilience?
Konrad Pieniądz:
Operational resilience is ultimately about reducing avoidable disruptions.Hand hygiene plays a role because it helps organizations manage contamination risks before they become larger operational problems.When hygiene controls are integrated into everyday operations, manufacturers are better positioned to protect product quality, maintain compliance and support uninterrupted production.In highly regulated environments, even a relatively small hygiene failure can trigger investigations, corrective actions or production delays.
Strong hygiene systems don’t eliminate risk entirely, but they help create a more stable and predictable operating environment.
If you could give manufacturing leaders one piece of advice, what would it be?
Konrad Pieniądz:
I would say: Stop thinking about hand hygiene as a standalone initiative.
The most successful manufacturers treat it as part of operational excellence and quality management. Manufacturing leaders don’t lose sleep over hand hygiene itself. They lose sleep over quality failures, audit findings, customer complaints and production disruptions. Hand hygiene is simply one of the controls that helps prevent them. The organisations that achieve the best results are usually not the ones with the longest procedures. They are the ones that make hygiene a natural part of how work gets done every day. When that happens, consistency improves, and quality, compliance and operational performance tend to improve with it.
An interview with Konrad Pieniadz, Sales Manager SVEMA Hygiene GmbH
