Safety encompasses every aspect of how we do business, across all functions and at every level. Keeping our people safe and making sure they return home safely to their families at the end of each workday is what drives us. Our focus is to strengthen a solid safety culture at Xella. We do this in several ways. The most popular approaches are the Total Safety Leadership (TSL) Program, Safety Walks and our Let’s talk safety events.

What is the Total Safety Leadership Program?

The TSL is an interactive workshop that equips leaders with the knowledge and understanding developing commitment, drive positive change and build a strong culture of safety in an organization.

It is a dynamic, exchange and experience driven program which explores crucial leadership, culture and behavioral aspects of workplace safety. By introducing the Total Safety Leadership Program in 2021, we gave our traditional Behavior Based Safety (BBS) approach a new touch and reached a new level.

All our leadership functions from production to sales and administration have gone through the training and every new leader receives an invitation from either Country or Corporate EHS after their start. New plant managers even receive a quick introduction to the main aspects during their first two weeks of onboarding.  “Consistency through visible and felt leadership is the key to keeping people safe. Our aim is to support our leaders to find and sharpen their personal safety leadership style”, says Katharina Steinkamp, EHS Manager at Xella Group. 

An initiative closely linked to the Total Safety Leadership approach is the Safety Walk. First introduced in 2017 as part of the BBS trainings, it was the classical tool to provide structured and positive feedback to employees on their safety behavior. Nowadays, after linking it to the TSL for most leaders, it has become the way they think and communicate about safety when they speak to their colleagues. We continue to provide training to all leaders on how to perform Safety Walks. In 2023, 2,077 Safety Walks were carried out by our leaders using observation, and discussion with employees to praise them or identify and understand behavioral risks together, in an appreciative manner. So far in 2024 is has been more than 4,000.

What is a Let’s Talk Safety event?

The "Let's Talk Safety" events are another Xella way to put the thoughts from the Total Safety Leadership program into practice. It is a day where we we stop production and leaders dedicate their time exclusively to our employees outside the usual production business. Leaders from different hierarchical levels and departments come together on site, engage in discussion and activities and personally share what matters most to them. Our Let's Talk Safety events are celebrated once a year at all our Xella locations around Europe.

"These events shape our common belief of a work environment that values safe production over production volume. It is important to transfer knowledge, but only by making it personal, fostering exchange and creating common experiences can we really initiate change," says Katharina Steinkamp.

Remarkably, these events are now so well received in many plants that they are held even when they are not mandatory. "We want the events to take place once a year. But even without asking for it, the majority of sites had already planned their next event and thought about how to exceed their colleagues program,” Michael Bundschuh, CTO Central Europe says. One key for this broad success is that the implementation and hosting is up to the countries and sites, which has triggered a lot of inspiring competition and best-practice exchange among the plants. By the way, the Let's Talk safety events are not only limited to the plants. The Dutch Construction Services and Sales Team has been among the first to plan and host their own events tailored to their needs. 

Let's explore some of the most inspiring recent approaches and activities from the countries:

• In the Czech Republic, the quality advisor Filip Verner created his own experimental stations in Melnik to show his audience how dangerous some of the chemicals can be if not handled with care. These experiments helped illustrate abstract dangers in a concrete and vivid way, which sparked great interest and reflection among employees.

• In this year’s edition of the polish  LTS events, an innovative cross-team approach was taken. Together with the HR Team around Beata Molska, they opened focus on the impact of wellbeing of employees on their safety and health, inviting everybody to also participate in preventive health screenings, including ultrasound examinations, workshops with dieticians, physiotherapists, and psychotherapists, reinforcing the company’s commitment to employee wellness. Watch the video.

• In the Netherlands, this year’s LTS were standing out through a really great cooperation with Orly Polak and hubcreations focusing on good and bad habits and also about putting yourself in a different role and understanding each other. To conclude, the colleagues went to the site armed with an iPad to notice and photograph unsafe situations that can be solved with 10,000 euros that were made available in addition to all investments in the field of security.

• The manager of the Ploiesti plant in Romania, Catalin Sandu, surprised his team: without them knowing, he collected photos of his employees' relatives and prepared a very personal message reinforcing the SEE's general message ‘Safety is my choice, not my obligation’.

• Never change a running system: the German sites continued with their approach from last year and offered employees one station during the rotation where they had 30 minutes exclusive time to exchange with their leaders from Top Management about safety.

• "Our story starts where prevention ends”: kicking off their LTS events in the new format for the first time, the Italian sites Atella and Pontenure decided to cooperate with ANMIL (Associazione Nazionale Mutilati e Invalidi del Lavoro - National Association of Mutilated and Invalids at Work). They shared their deeply personal stories about how a work accident changed their lives forever. This openness made our colleagues not only hear but truly feel the impact of how one wrong decision can profoundly affect your life, your family, and your colleagues.

These creative and personal approaches help to make safety tangible and felt by all our colleagues. They all contribute to anchoring safety as a value not only in theory, but above all in practice.