Workplace safety

Maintaining a proactive and just safety culture to achieve zero harm

We cultivate a proactive safety culture where every Harmonite is empowered to make safe decisions by:

• Creating a proactive safety mindset that is deeply embedded in our work routines and decisions
• Empowering middle managers and supervisors by equipping them with the tools, authority and confidence to lead their teams towards success
• Fostering a just culture where discipline, accountability and consequence at every level identify significant unwanted events
• Moving beyond compliance to a culture of care and continuous improvement where we learn from and prevent accidents.

This commitment to a just culture ultimately leads to improved organisational performance and a more resilient workforce, capable of adapting to and overcoming challenges.

• Our proactive safety culture is further enabled by an organisational effectiveness improvement discipline, which provides thought leadership on culture transformation from a humanistic perspective through:
• Organisational culture improvement
• An employee value proposition
• Operational improvement and effectiveness.

By aligning behaviour with safety standards and remaining vigilant to the wellbeing of colleagues, every employee contributes to a culture where safety is not just a priority, it is a collective commitment.

Embedding risk management to identify and respond to risk

Risk management is an integral part of our operations, driven by key processes that include:

• Using a proactive, four-layered risk assessment approach
• Emphasising the importance of employee engagement driving the value of safety and accountability to sustain a safe work environment through routine visible felt leadership days and safety days in collaboration with our key stakeholders (Harmony Tripartite structure)
• Using digitisation that enables data collection and analysis to provide leading indicators that inform decision making (both lagging and leading)
• Setting and measuring performance against strategic priorities and safety-related KPIs at an executive level.

Our critical control management process allows for the effective identification and implementation of risk-based controls to prevent significant unwanted events or minimise impact should they occur. We categorise controls based on their position in the hierarchy of controls and the survivability, availability and reliability rating of the control. These controls inform our leading indicators that enable us to measure how effectively we embed risk management as part of our risk-adapted business process model. We analyse control effectiveness through digital monitoring to identify improvement opportunities on control performance.

Innovating with continuous business improvement

Harmony is dedicated to being a learning organisation, consistently exploring innovative methods to enhance our processes and enable continuous improvement. These include:

• Implementing digitised multidisciplinary start-up risk assessments and pre-planning of workplaces, planned maintenance and high-risk work verification and deficiency response
• Leveraging insights from past incidents, internally and industry-wide
• Identifying new technology and processes to enhance how we monitor, measure and report on safety while enabling us to continuously learn and share these learnings across our organisation.

We also adopt industry-leading practices, including:

• The Minerals Council South Africa’s Mining Industry Occupational Safety and Health (MOSH) community-of-practice adoption process and initiatives, which have been established from learnings across the industry that have been tried and tested as best practice
• Upholding MineSafe conference outcomes in our visible felt safety leadership approach and behavioural interventions
• Aligning critical hazard control management with the ICMM guidelines and principles, which assists us in preventing or mitigating serious incidents
• Monitoring and managing mining-related seismicity through short-term hazard assessments and long-term plans.

Collaboration and partnerships

Collaborating and partnering with key stakeholders is paramount in strengthening the implementation of our safety strategy. We engage with employees to receive their feedback and incorporate this into actions taken by management to support our teams in achieving safe production. We also enable contractor alignment with and understanding of our safety requirements and expectations, while building related capacity.

Our collaboration with South African stakeholders includes:

• Monthly alignment meetings
• Leading the culture transformation workstream for the Tripartite, a multi-stakeholder task team supported by the Minerals Council South Africa
• Benchmarking with external stakeholders and subject matter experts to continuously improve and implement best practices, eg risk propensity work.

Our Australasian engagements include:

• Collaborating with the Mineral Resources Authority in Papua New Guinea to address safety risks and solve various operational issues
• Building a strong working relationship with the Queensland mining safety regulator through open and transparent communication and reporting
• Establishing a strong working relationship with a neighbouring mine at Eva Copper, including emergency response capability support.
• Collaboration with the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIIM) and the Australian Resources and Energy Employer Association (AREEA), the peak bodies and voices of the Australian mining sector.