From June 29 to July 3, Matfer’s Workplace Safety Week brought together teams from Matfer Industrie & Logistique at the Longny site. The five-day event focused on occupational risk prevention, quality of life at work (QLW), and building a shared safety culture.
The program was based on two complementary formats: a physical and ergonomic workshop, and an escape game designed in-house based on real-life situations. Each participant left with a first-aid kit that can be used in everyday life.
Matfer Workplace Safety Week: Five Days of Awareness Activities in Longny
Safety isn’t something you can simply decree once a year in a memo. It’s maintained through key events that bring the issue back into focus, followed by habits that carry on throughout the rest of the year.
This is the approach Matfer has adopted for this workplace safety week: moving away from a top-down approach, encouraging hands-on activities, promoting reflection, and having participants experience situations firsthand rather than just describing them.
Three objectives guided the approach:
prevent occupational hazards specific to an industrial and logistics environment;
improve the quality of life at work, particularly with regard to posture;
to foster a collective safety culture, where everyone knows how to identify and report issues.
Overall Coordination: Ergonomics Through Awareness of Movement
The first part took the form of a workshop titled “Global Coordination,” inspired by the Alexander Technique. It was led by Maud Krhajac, a trainer based in Longny.
The Alexander Technique Applied to the Workplace
The Alexander Technique focuses on the relationship between posture, breathing, and movement. When applied to the workplace, it shifts the perspective: rather than correcting an isolated movement, it helps each person become aware of how they engage their body in the overall process of a task.
The workshop therefore focused on body awareness, ergonomics, movements, and postures—topics directly applicable to material handling, order fulfillment, and packaging operations.
Preventing Work-Related Health Problems
Work-related disorders develop gradually. They result from repetitive movements, forced postures, and uneven weight distribution—and rarely from a single incident.
Working on movement perception allows us to take action early on, before the discomfort becomes chronic. This is one of the concrete benefits of this component of Matfer’s Workplace Safety Week.
Why use an escape game to discuss risk prevention?
Because simply memorizing a safety guideline doesn’t mean it’s been followed. The second component, the Safety Escape Game, was custom-designed by the HR and QHSE teams at Matfer Industrie & Logistique.
Scenarios Based on Real-World Experience
The puzzles weren’t taken from a generic catalog. They were based on real-life situations encountered in the site’s work environment.
This internal structure changes the scope of the exercise. Participants are not solving an abstract case; they are recognizing situations they actually encounter, which makes the transfer to their job immediate.
The Escape Game: A Highlight of Matfer's Workplace Safety Week
The immersive and collaborative format was designed to achieve three objectives:
strengthen preventive reflexes under time pressure;
to help students identify occupational hazards in a familiar setting;
promote best practices in workplace safety through peer-to-peer exchange.
The workshop was a huge success with the participants. A simple indicator, but one that is rarely insignificant: engagement is key to retention.
Awards and Prizes: What the Participants Received
The winning teams received two awards.
A one-of-a-kind trophy, designed and crafted by the Fab-one workshop. This piece, manufactured in-house, embodies the connection between industrial expertise and a preventive approach.
An automotive safety hammer used to cut a seat belt and break a window in an emergency.
Because when it comes to prevention, everyone wins, all participants went home with a portable first-aid kit. It’s a useful item for everyday use, whether on the road or at home.
Prevention is everyone’s responsibility. Every effort to raise awareness helps create a safer, more responsible, and more productive work environment.
A big thank you to all the participants, the HR and QHSE teams, Maud Krhajac, and the Fab-one team for their creativity, dedication, and commitment to health, safety, and well-being in the workplace.