MAKING IT PERSONAL DRIVES DOWN NUMBERS
BY TONY WOOD
Overall Company Safety
Every manufacturing site’s goal is to operate with zero safety incidents. This is especially true at LyondellBasell, where our GoalZERO value drives us to operate safely every day with zero incidents, zero injuries and zero accidents. This value reflects our commitment to working together to reduce and eliminate incidents and support each other as we strive for excellence.
We cultivate a GoalZERO mindset with clear standards, regular communication, training and targeted campaigns and events, including our annual Global Safety Day, where all employees devote one day to enhance their learning about safety at work and home. Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) indicators are monitored continuously using a performance dashboard. Every manufacturing site sets goals to improve process and occupational safety and to reduce environmental incidents.
We are incredibly proud of our safety performance in 2023. Our overall company Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRIR) was 0.139, considered top decile performance for our industry. Sixty manufacturing sites achieved GoalZERO performance, and sixty-seven sites were injury-free. A noteworthy example in the US was our Channelview Complex, which set a site record TRIR of 0.06 and a company record of 6.96 MM safe work hours.
Channelview Complex Challenge
While we are proud of our record and milestones, we felt something was missing at Channelview Complex over the last several years in our safety process. We believed that a more robust field engagement strategy would help us drive down safety numbers even further, and we challenged the entire complex to engage more to reduce incidents. As a result, our job observations and life-critical audits increased; our incident rate decreased, as seen in the chart.
The Channelview Complex HSE and leadership teams took on the challenge of engaging more personally in the field to achieve better results. The teams looked at how it engaged our employees and contractors, focusing not on the role of safety cops, as is sometimes the perception, but as everyday safety partners. We took all the usual steps to make safety a focus. Then we moved it to the next level, making safety personal, which eliminated the policing perception and moved it to partner. To encourage the personal aspect of safety, we relied on our EAGLES observations, which are the responsibility of every employee and contractor at the site. Eliminating Accidents Guarantees Lasting Employee Safety, or EAGLES for short, is where we ask employees and contractors to engage in a productive conversation whenever they see any safety issue. Collectively, we performed 27,000 EAGLES job observations last year.
Contractors Helping Everyone Stay Safe, or CHESS, also played a vital role in helping us achieve safety milestones. Our contractors who operate at the site have joined our GoalZEROmindset, and we include them in our safety statistics. Because of this, we build relationships with our contractors to allow open discussion. It’s that open dialogue and commitment to each other that creates a safe space for everyone to challenge each other to ensure safety is a focus.
Many improvements in the complex and safety performance today can be attributed to technology and operational learning. We will continue to invest in new technology to enhance safety performance and advance best practices in our operations. But for us at Channelview Complex, safety continues to be personal. And that personal drive allows us to celebrate every day our team safely goes home to their family and friends.
