Safety

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  • At 11:28am, 27 May 2024

Safety is our foremost corporate value. Employees are our most important stakeholder and a vital capital resource. Ensuring their safety is a business and moral imperative. Our aim is to prevent loss of life and achieve zero harm across our operations so that employees can return home each day, safely, healthy and well.

Safety achievements

Phased safety risk management strategy

Our group-wide safety risk management strategy involves identifying, assessing, and controlling harmful threats. It is based on real-time data, particularly leading indicators, to support proactive risk management initiatives and safe, profitable production.

This strategy strives for more engaged and proactive behaviour and is being rolled out to systematically embed risk management in our operating culture and in employee behaviour. It also assists in identifying leading indicators to enable front line employees to proactively address risks in the workplace, implement mitigating controls and decrease the probability of an incident, accident or injury occurring.

Leading indicators are reported daily in the miner’s work note, which provides safety, occupational health and production-related information alerting crews to workplace risks. Such indicators include safe declarations, golden control monitoring and learning from incidents. Automated systems and processes enable continuous assessment of workplace conditions and equipment to avoid risks, both on surface and underground, and effectively monitor safety-related initiatives.

Capacitation

Begun in April 2018, this phase involved the modernisation of systems, processes and information sharing to enable proactive management. Mining teams require information before entering a workplace so that crews are aware of hazards identified in previous shifts and can ensure the area is safe before entry.

Intervention

Implementation of this phase began in February 2021 and involves systematically entrenching the ICMM’s critical safety management plan to better equip us to identify significant unwanted events and related mitigating controls.

This phase, completed at the end of January 2023, focuses mainly on ensuring appropriate processes are in place at each operation to embed a proactive approach to safety. It includes golden control monitoring and improved responses to golden control failures. Golden controls are the principal preventive safety measures employed at our operations. They include hazard awareness campaigns, related safety training, and a digitised risk assessment programme (the engineering safe operating model) to identify potential high-risk tasks.

Reinforcement

The focus from 2021 to end 2023 is on the sustainability and integration of our Thibakotsi (Sesotho for “prevent harm”) initiative. This initiative entails adopting a humanistic, proactive approach to transforming our company culture as we journey to zero harm.

Performance

Safety performanceFY22FY21FY20FY19FY18
Loss of life     
Group131161113
South Africa131161113
 Papua New Guinea—————
Fatal injury frequency rate (per million hours worked) 
Group0.130.110.080.120.16
Lost-time injury frequency rate (per million hours worked)  
Group5.65¹6.18²6.33²6.16²6.26²
South Africa5.96.466.696.486.67
 Papua New Guinea0.17—0.770.35—
  1. Assured by independent assurance providers in the current year. Refer to the assurance report and the glossary of terms on the website, www.har.co.za.
  2. Assured by independent auditors in prior years – refer to https://www.harmony.co.za/investors/reporting/annual-reports.

Focus in FY23

We will continue with the digitisation programme with the engineering safe operating model and integration of data to provide a holistic view of critical information for proactive decision making and engagement with middle management to support and sustain the Thibakotsi journey. We will also investigate the feasibility of new technologies to improve safety controls.

A major focus area will be the S300 programme that aims to achieve an average of 300m2 of zero harm per in-stope team every month.

Further information

See discussions on our approach to safety and related performance.

ESG Report 2023
ESG data tables
A best-in-class safety strategy