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Cellophane Wraps Up Safety!

A 500 employee site based in Bridgwater, BCL produced Cellophane film. With a robust safety management system in place, they thought they were on their way to great safety performance, with an average 10% annual reduction

However, an upturn in the severity of injuries had them worried. They discovered that most of the injuries were related to unsafe behavior.


Safety Climate Survey
The project began with a Safety Climate Survey to discover how safety was perceived. This revealed many system issues were causing problems which led to the unsafe behaviors. Management rapidly took corrective action.

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

Checklist Development
Checklists containing safe behaviors were developed for 14 departments from an analysis of the previous two years incident records and from those specified by employees in the safety climate survey. These were approved by the workforce before 48 volunteer observers were trained.

Process
The observers monitored their colleagues on the plant for 10-20 minutes a day for four weeks, to find out how safe people were working. Each work group then set themselves a safety improvement target.

Observers continued to monitor daily and gave feedback when observing people and at weekly feedback meetings. Corrective actions, followed up by the project team were reported back to the workgroups. This cycle of checklist development, observer training and setting new targets with regular feedback was repeated every 20 weeks or so.

Results
During the first year, minor injuries reduced by 55% while Lost-time injuries reduced by a dramatic 82%!

No lost-time accidents were recorded after the second year, while minor injuries continued to plummet.

The site scooped the British Safety Councils 5 Star award in 1996.

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