Podcast: The impact of footwear on managing workplace heat, fatigue, and safety

In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Plant Services chief editor Thomas Wilk talks with Tito Warren of Red Wing Shoes about the challenges industrial facilities face in protecting workers from heat stress during the summer months. Their conversation explores the role of hydration, environmental controls, PPE, and emerging wearable technologies in supporting worker health and safety. They also discuss how footwear affects fatigue, endurance, and overall physical performance, while highlighting the importance of training, teamwork, and proactive safety cultures. The episode offers practical insights for manufacturers seeking to improve worker well-being and operational performance in demanding environments.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

Thomas Wilk, Plant Services: Hi everyone and welcome to a new episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, brought to you by Endeavor Business Media's Manufacturing Group. I am Tom Wilk, the chief editor of Plant Services, and with us today for a special summer episode is Tito Warren and he's the president of Global Industrial at Red Wing Shoe Company. I've been observing Red Wing shoes for a long, long time. I wore them when I was a cart pusher back in one of my first jobs out of high school. Our managing editor uses them, her husband uses them on the job, he's a carpenter. And today we're going to talk with Tito about overcoming gaps in warm weather safety strategy for industrial workers, and it's not just about the shoes. So Tito, welcome to the podcast.

Tito Warren: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

PS: So here we are. As we record this, it's May 19th here in Chicago. We just had a couple of 80+ ºF days, and it's going to be even hotter anywhere south of here.

TW: Here it comes!

PS: We were talking before we pressed the record button about the fact that Red Wing's got facilities all over the world, not even just the U.S., and that heat in the summer is a real situation to be dealt with, accommodated, and managed, right?

TW: It is. In so many of the areas that we work in the world, high heat / high humidity is kind of our nemesis. And so when we are designing and developing solutions for industrial workers – 

industrial athletes – it's really around how do you mitigate that kind of pressure, that kind of environment so that people can perform to their best ability? And it is a never-ending quest because there are so many things that go into it from environment, from materials, from the solutions that you develop. There's so much that goes into it.

PS: As a former educator, I was always taught to say three nice things before you start criticizing what people might be doing. So let's start with the positive when it comes to how plants handle heat in the summertime. In your opinion, you mentioned that heat is more complicated than it looks. What are the things that plants in your experience tend to get right about managing the summer heat?

TW: I think that there's been a great shift, let's say over the last 10, 20 years, where it's important to hydrate. I mean, that's the big one, right? It's hydration, hydration, hydration. You've got a lot of focus now on ambient control where it's possible. If you're working inside, how do you manage ambient control? And then obviously there's that piece around scheduled breaks, inside or outside, and being able to make sure that people are taking appropriate breaks when necessary and that monitoring, right? I think that those three things that they've done really well has moved the needle into a lot of other aspects on how do you build on those, right? How do you build on the big three?

PS: That's interesting. I'm living this right now. I've got three boys at home now, two in middle school, one in high school. I swear, I'm tripping over water bottles everywhere, and that was not the case when I was their age. I don't think in the professional world either. So it's good to hear that hydration is really caught on as a necessity.

TW: Yeah, it's true. And again, I think it migrates from professional sports or just athletics in general. The hydration piece, when we were growing up, it was, oh, you know, consume a bit of water, get some Gatorade on board and you'll be fine, throw them back out there. And now, the technology in just how do you prep the body for, pre-, during, and post-athletics or work, it's all part of a strategy, right? There's been a lot of work done in the physiology side, the biomechanics side on how to prep the body. It's a tool, it's a machine, and so you've got to train that body to be able to withstand the rigors of whatever it's going to be put in front of.

PS: I noticed in the list of things you mentioned that you see plants doing correctly, one of the things that wasn't on the list was everyday gear and the way people can prepare based on what they're wearing to manage the heat. Let's talk about that. What are some of the gaps that you're seeing in the strategies that plants deploy when it comes to the gear they're wearing? What stuff is easily missed, or things that you think can be improved?

TW: Well, I think that you've had an evolution, specifically in gear, and that's in clothing and footwear, general PPE in all aspects. I think that's evolving, this aspect of your approach to high heat, high humidity areas has really has really changed dramatically in five or 10 years and it's accelerating because of the use of lightweight materials, synthetic materials for clothing, the importance of making sure that the body is actually cooling itself. You have to be able to prepare and facilitate the body's natural ability to regulate temperature. 

And so how is science now developing things that enhance the body's natural ability? When you think about gear, we see so many great things that are coming out and even the advent of smart gear, where gear is being hooked up to the body to monitor how somebody is performing. So biomechanics, you kind of get into this discussion now where, is it Big Brother watching you and all of that kind of stuff. And it's an interesting environment where you're trying to balance the good of the employee versus the overwatch and the things that they get into that. But society is wrestling with that, and smart gear or biomechanic monitoring is a frontier, a new frontier.

PS: I’m glad you brought up the biomechanical gear because there were some sensors that I had seen a couple of years ago where they were asking some workers in the field to wear them just to make sure that no one had, say, fully collapsed out in the heat. And it was a challenge because depending on what kind of environment you were in at the plant – was it union, was it non-union? Were people in the legal team, no matter what the union status was, were they aware of possible HIPAA violations and did IT know the security protocols? It's complicated.

TW: It's really complicated, right? And if you can just go back and anchor to the point of health and safety, and you can focus on that and then I guess let the let the lawyers of the world try to figure out the rest of it, hopefully we'll land in a good spot. But there's so much great technology out there today. I mean, we've seen things that have migrated from hospitals, remote sensing where you can monitor somebody when they're when they're beginning to show fatigue, beginning to show stress. So it's a proactive approach rather than a reactive “hey, John just collapsed and his heart rate is X on the floor” to “hey, John is starting to fatigue, let's get him some water or let's get him into a cool spot” so that you're being proactive and you're monitoring the situation. And again, I recognize it's a balancing act, because everybody's different, everybody performs differently, so how do you make sure that you're not stepping on people's rights and impacting their individualism as a worker, right? You’ve got to protect both sides.

PS: You do. That proactive approach, I think that's going to register with a lot of our asset management professionals who are being introduced to a lot of technologies which can help more proactively manage machine health. Why wouldn't you want to proactively manage human health, as long as you can solve those privacy issues and cover yourself there too?

TW: Exactly right. It's the new frontier, it really is. It'll be really interesting to see how society embraces that and where it goes and the technology that comes out of it. It's very exciting stuff.

PS: We're talking about smart tech as one of those issues which isn't specifically environmental. Are there environmental factors out there which can surprise plant teams by causing gaps that some other plant teams would otherwise see?

TW: Yeah, there's lots of stuff that's out there. When you're depending on the facility that you're in and it's, you have machinery that's working, that's throwing off heat, you've got the ambient temperature in the facility, you've got airflow, all of these different kinds of things that will impact somebody's ability to, for the lack of a better term, just stay performing, right, and be able to recover from stress or from fatigue. There's a lot that goes into it, it's not just “well it's hot in the facility,” there's lots of things that are generating heat. Is it a high humidity facility? Is it a is it a dry facility? All of these things go into, fundamentally, is your body able to use its natural ability to cool down? That's what it is: how do you facilitate your own capability to react to that environment?