Safety

Achieving zero harm

We remain committed to our objective of zero harm. We put safety first and believe that every employee has the right to return home unharmed every day. While we have made significant progress in improving our safety performance in recent years, we recognise that we still have much to do to achieve an environment of zero harm.

While management takes ultimate accountability for safety, we believe that safety is a joint responsibility, and that safe and healthy workplaces can only be achieved through joint responsibility by management, employees and unions, and the regulators.

Our safety strategy is based on four pillars – systems; people and behaviour; engineering solutions; and wellness in the workplace.

The safety, health and wellbeing of our employees are our foremost value. Our robust health and safety strategies underpin our leading response to managing the infectious coronavirus disease (Covid-19) across our operations and our unwavering focus on eliminating fatalities by reducing (and ultimately eliminating) injuries from the workplace, as well as mitigating any adverse effects on human health. Our aim is to continually build and instil both a company and industry culture that protects people from harm and improves their health and wellbeing

Read our Sustainability report 2023

Systems

We implement systems to identify risks and the causes of incidents, and to implement controls to prevent those incidents from recurring. Our primary safety risks are falls-of-ground and transport and we have specific, high-priority programmes in place to address these.

All safety-related incidents are reported, investigated and analysed for trends and/or anomalies.

Risk management is a critical area of focus at all levels of the organisation. Our skills development programme empowers all employees to address risk and specific hazards in their workplaces.

We identify sub-standard and high-risk conditions on a continuous basis, and rank workplaces based on observed risks. Management regularly visit the 10 workplaces with the highest risk ranking across all our operations and these, and appropriate actions to be taken, are discussed regularly at executive level.

We believe that leading indicators are a proactive means of improving safety. We identify report and monitor the following leading indicators on a monthly basis:

Safety leadership acts, which are formal safety engagements with employees in the workplace.
Close-out of all safety actions.
Risk management training.
Maintenance delivered to programme.
High-potential incident reporting and investigation. We treat high potential incidents in the same way as incidents that have resulted in injuries.
Safety competence/ training.
Improving the quality of risk management.

People and behaviour

Our Zero Harm in Action programme focuses on creating a culture of compliance where all employees take ownership of their own safety and that of their colleagues.

Zero harm in action initiative

Research has shown that most accidents are precipitated by some form of human error. We developed an approach at Tumela Mine to address this human component of safety. This approach is being rolled out across the Group as part of the Zero Harm in Action initiative.

The focus of this initiative is to develop the safety conscious worker, at all levels of the organisation: the safety conscious worker who avoids engaging in risky behaviour and remains calm and attentive during times of increased pressure.

Additionally, our ABC of Mining programme at our School of Mines exposes employees at all levels to the basics of mining safety.

Read our Sustainability report 2023

Engineering solutions

We make significant investment in engineering controls to manage our risks. For instance, we have recently implemented a locomotive management system at all our conventional underground mines which has notably reduced the number of transport-related accidents. Other engineering solutions are vehicle and person detection systems which use sensors to detect the proximity of vehicles and people.

2023 Sustainability Report

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