A unionized site based in Stallingborough, Lincolnshire, reduced their injury rate by 67% in the first 12 months. The site produces Titanium Dioxide (Ti02) through a chloride process, which is used as a whitener in numerous consumer products principally paints, plastics and papers.

The project began with a Safety Survey of more than 800 employees to discover how they viewed safety. This revealed many problematic system issues which led people to behave unsafely. Resulting corrective actions were rapidly taken by management.

Training
B-Safe^® implementation began with the training of employee project coordinators and management champions over five days. This covered the underlying principles of behavioral safety, checklist development, managerial alignment, training observers, goal-setting, feedback, and data entry & analysis.

Checklist Development
Checklists containing specific safe behaviors were developed to monitor 52 different areas across the site, by analyzing the previous two years incident records. These were approved by the workforce before 185 observers volunteered to be trained.

Process
The observers monitored their colleagues once a day, for 10-20 minutes for four weeks, to find out how safely people were actually working. At the end of the four weeks, employees in each of the observation areas collectively set their own safety improvement targets. Observers continued to monitor daily and gave feedback when observing people and at weekly feedback meetings. The project team coordinators also followed up any corrective actions, which they reported back to each of the workgroups. Since then 400 people have been trained as observers by the project team coordinators.

Results
During the first year, the OSHA Lost Workday Injury Rate (LWIR) fell by 67%. After 3 years the site achieved a Zero Lost Workday Injury Rate, which has since been maintained. In 2005, the site's safety performance was recognized by the Chemical Industry Association (CIA) with a Gold Award.