As the world united to fight COVID-19 during 2020, Dana’s top priority was always the health and safety of our employees, our communities, and our customers.
We felt the power of the Dana family, not just from the formal actions implemented across the organization to navigate the crisis, but also the individual behaviors that have made a significant impact on the safety and welfare of our people. Together, we have worked to ensure that we remain safe and act responsibly whether on the job or in the communities that we call home.
To this end, we implemented numerous pandemic-related protocols throughout our global operations to further ensure health and safety across more than 140 facilities in 33 countries. These actions included restricting access or temporarily closing a significant number of our plants, increasing cleaning and disinfecting protocols, utilizing personal protection equipment, adhering to social distancing guidelines, instituting remote work, and restricting travel.
Employee Experience
These unprecedented times fundamentally challenged how Dana leaders engaged with their team members and addressed new concerns about stress, health, safety, financial wellness, and work-life balance.
To understand the implications of COVID-19 on the employee experience, Dana participated in global research which provided leaders and local management teams with insights on how to shape the organizational strategy to support fast recovery, and ultimately prepare for the new normal.
The study focused on four main dimensions — concern and connection, virtual work effectiveness, employee wellness / health and safety, and senior leadership response and communication — and across each category Dana scored favorable feedback.
Through it all, we communicated on a regular cadence with our teams so they felt confident, whether they were working safely in a Dana facility or from their homes — enabling quick and decisive action to protect our people while serving our customers.
Ultimately, our manufacturing facilities did their part to ensure that the critical mobility industry could continue to operate during the pandemic. We helped to keep the world moving by supplying elemental components to essential vehicles such as ambulances, food harvesters, and material handling equipment.
Accordingly, we expanded our safety protocols, including implementing employee and visitor health self-checks and temperature monitoring, stringent disinfecting and hygiene practices, increasing facility air exchanges, further separating employees from one another and asking employees who can do their job remotely to work from home.
In addition, our global teams delivered tirelessly in acquiring the necessary PPE and other protective supplies as we worked toward bringing more facilities safely back online. We have and will continue to follow government and health officials’ guidelines — locally and globally — to ensure that we are doing everything in our power to keep our employees safe.
“We felt the power of the Dana family, not just from the formal actions implemented, but also the individual behaviors that have made a significant impact on the safety and welfare of our people.”
Selflessly Collaborating
While we proved agile in adapting to the pandemic, many of the core anchoring tenets of how we work have remained the same. These revolve around staying connected within our engineering and manufacturing teams through constant, consistent, and clear communication to drive the company forward in these challenging times.
Dana has been implementing cloud-based productive platforms and cybersecurity tools for some time. The pandemic has amplified these demands, requiring us to rapidly deploy laptops to teams throughout the world while leveraging the full capabilities of video conferencing to keep in touch with our customers and suppliers. Open and honest communication, in its various forms, has long been a foundational value of Dana.
Creative Solutions
As a technology company with a 117-year history, we have a culture of innovation that anticipates industry trends and challenges.
During the height of this pandemic, many of the world’s health systems were — and sometimes still are — in dire need of equipment to protect health care workers. Not only did we manage through the operational challenges of the pandemic with more than 100 facilities temporarily idled, but our teams around the world also applied their expertise to support frontline workers, including manufacturing personal protective equipment and critical components for ventilators.
At our Advanced Manufacturing Center in Maumee, Ohio, United States, our engineers designed, tested, and produced a 3D printed face shield for local healthcare professionals in less than a week. We used our engineering expertise to reduce the amount of material needed to produce a version that is strong, durable, and lightweight that could be sterilized and reused. We were proud to work alongside many front-line providers and great partners in our communities.
We also helped to develop a plexiglass enclosure that allows doctors and nurses to have full visibility of and access to the patient during intubation and extubation. The device can be sanitized and used multiple times. In order to create more impact outside of Dana’s local communities, we made the face shields and intubation enclosures open source by allowing the designs to be freely downloaded on Dana Cares.
Our global purchasing team helped hospitals to source critically needed personal protective equipment, such as gloves, shoe covers, glasses, and masks to help protect medical professionals and first responders.
In China, we donated 50,000 masks to the local governments in Hubei Provence and the Dana Charitable Foundation in the United States also donated financially to organizations such as the United Way and Red Cross, which are on the front lines of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
These are just a few examples of the extraordinary efforts that were made by Dana team members all around the world. We also have countless individuals who are helping their local communities by volunteering their time, giving blood, donating money, delivering food, or even making masks. Whatever is needed to make a difference.