Case Study: Mine Safety Appliances boosts employee engagement and eliminates inefficiencies with IdeaScale

Lighting the Way for the Next Hundred Years

MSA Safety, founded in 1914, is a global leader in safety products used across industries from mining to firefighting. Facing a need to modernize after an internal employee survey, the company identified widespread daily process inefficiencies and lacked a fast, transparent way for staff to propose and resolve operational roadblocks across functions.

MSA launched the WTF@MSA? crowdsourcing campaign on IdeaScale—a social media–style idea platform—and ran a four‑week pilot with more than 700 users (693 participated), yielding 50 ideas, hundreds of comments and about 4,000 votes. The top ideas (revamping performance management, company‑wide single sign‑on and a new engineering documentation process) were elevated to management, several suggestions were green‑lit, participant feedback was highly positive, and MSA plans to expand IdeaScale campaigns companywide.

Mine Safety Appliances

Douglas McClaine

Senior Vice President, Secretary and Chief Legal Officer