Our Thibakotsi journey is transforming the employee experience

At Harmony, our employees’ safety is a priority no matter what. Through Thibakotsi, our humanistic safety transformation journey, we care for our employees by putting a proactive safety culture in place to get them home safely every day.

Entrenching a safety culture in our workforce of 45 546 people is as complex as it is crucial. All stakeholders justifiably expect the mining industry to keep its people safe, and Harmony’s Thibakotsi (meaning “to prevent harm” in Sesotho) journey demonstrates our ongoing commitment to protect our people, who are critical to our intellectual capital.

Since 2021, we have focused on humanistic transformation and personal accountability through Thibakotsi. Effective collaboration and personal accountability are core to this, embedding in our workforce the understanding that achieving zero harm, zero accidents and zero fatalities requires all individuals to prioritise safety by behaving in line with safety standards and being alert to their colleagues’ safety

Key to Thibakotsi’s success is ensuring it is accessible, understandable and actionable by all employees. We engaged extensively with our operations to map out our future focus areas, which include:

• Ensuring our leaders take ownership of the process and continue working on key development areas for themselves and their teams
• Implementing the Harmony employee engagement strategy, including the Harmony visual route map and middle management and supervisory empowerment programme, to achieve an engaged workforce supported by middle managers and supervisors as champions of the Thibakotsi journey
• Applying the risk propensity operating procedure to improve the employee risk profile through proactive management actions
• Incorporating Thibakotsi in operational routines to sustainably embed the Thibakotsi elements as the new way of working in Harmony, thereby preventing Thibakotsi from being seen as a separate project outside of regular work
• Addressing Thibakotsi team training issues highlighted by employees and providing feedback to
  employees to strengthen the psychological contract of hope, trust and respect between managers and employees while embedding a safety culture
• Implementing key areas of culture improvement identified by employees in the Barrett culture survey.

We recognise that any culture change journey takes years to be fully embedded. Still, we are encouraged to see the positive impact of Thibakotsi on our people’s safety over the past three years.