We illustrate this with our vision "Safe Work. Safe Life" vision and a long-term zero-accident strategy. However, we have set out in our health and safety mission statement that responsibility for us means much more than simply complying with legal requirements. We have specified this in a Groupwide policy and standardized the topics of risk assessment, employee instruction and training, accident investigations and reporting throughout the Group. Comprehensive safety programs and measures operationalize the requirements.

Safe Work. Safe Life.

As part of our safety management, we have developed and implemented three safety programs in recent years aimed at reducing the frequency and severity of accidents. We also focus on safety culture by increasing the safety awareness of our employees, for example through regular training and safety dialogs. Last year, 2,000 of these dialogs took place between managers and employees. Since the beginning of 2017, we have also more than tripled the number of our EHS (Environment Health Safety) managers at Xella companies to ensure implementation and compliance with our health and safety standards. 
A second focus is on technology, where, for example, it is a matter of regularly adapting to the latest safety standards. The third focus is on organization: An important component here is the 10 "life-saving rules" that apply throughout the Group and are binding for all employees as well as contractual partners, or external safety assessments that we have carried out on a regular basis.

Increasing occupational safety

Working at Xella should be safe – in production, administration, or sales. Our firm intention is to measurably increase occupational safety at Xella for all employee groups. To achieve this, we have set ourselves the following goals:

• 0 occupational accidents – as a long-term goal, we want to reduce the number of accidents in the Xella Group's daily business operations to zero
• 40% reduction in lost-time accident frequency and 66% reduction in accident severity by 2025 (base year 2019)

Our lost time injury frequency (LTI) rate also illustrates that we are on the right track here: since the start of the safety programs in 2017, we have been able to reduce the lost time injury rate Group-wide from 19.0 to 8.8 in 2020, more than halving it.