Safety

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  • At 11:44am, 16 Dec 2024

Keeping our employees safe is unequivocal.  As our foremost value, safety is embedded in everything we do. Employees are our most important stakeholders and a vital asset to our business. Ensuring their safety is a business and moral imperative.  Our focus is on preventing loss of life and achieving zero-harm operation-wide so that employees can return home each day, safe and healthy.

Safety achievements

SAFETY RISK MANAGEMENT

We apply the most stringent safety principles to offset the risks associated with the complexity of mining activities.

These principles aim to eliminate loss of life and injuries in our exploration activities, underground, surface and open-pit operations.

Guiding Principles

  • Our policies and practices align with the Mine Health and Safety Act in South Africa, the Mining (Safety) Act in Papua New Guinea and the Mining and Quarrying Safety and Health Act in Australia
  • We ensure critical control management is consistent with the International Council of Mining and Minerals (ICMM) guidelines and principles
  • Harmony collaborates in leading practice development and implementation through the Mining Industry Occupational Safety and Health (MOSH, South Africa)community-of-practice adoption process.

People Management

  • Our executive team drives strategic priorities and safety-related KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
  • Visible felt safety leadership and behavioural interventions uphold MineSafe conference outcomes
  • We employ full-time, well-trained safety and health stewards group-wide
  • Work stops when our workplaces or actions are unsafe
  • Harmony empowers employees to recognise positive and negative safety behaviour

Culture and Attitude

  • Proactive risk assessment is a way of life for Harmony
  • We implement lessons learnt from incidents
  • Clear communication (in local languages) spreads our safety culture transformation messages
  • Harmony hosts two national safety days annually

Innovation

We continuously modernise our safety systems and processes to effectively communicate critical information to the workplace.

  • Our systems monitor and manage mining-related seismicity through short-term hazard assessments and long-term plans

OUR APPROACH

Our journey towards zero harm and preventing injuries is supported by:

  • The Thibakotsi journey, our humanistic culture transformation programme.
  • Three key drivers for culture transformation are: the improvement of leadership maturity, leaders developing others, and high levels of employee engagement.
  • Introducing and adopting industry-leading practices,
  • A defined safety strategy that enables a proactive safety culture,  uses digitisation and modernisation while adopting an embedded risk management approach.

FY23 PERFORMANCE AND FOCUS AREAS

Our safety risk management strategy significantly increased our white flag (accident-free) days. Our lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) in South Africa improved to 5.74 (FY22: 5.90) per million hours worked and our group LTIFR was 5.49 (FY22: 5.65) per million hours worked at year end. In particular, we reduced our fall-of-ground LTIFR in South Africa to 1.09 (FY22: 1.36) per million hours worked.

Our South African surface operations celebrated 3.6 million loss-of-life-free shifts. At Hidden Valley in Papua New Guinea, no loss of life was recorded for the sixth consecutive year. Despite this progress, we tragically lost 6 (FY22: 13) colleagues at our South African operations.

We continuously strive for zero harm. All our safety initiatives are guided by this principle and all learnings are applied to eliminate loss of life at Harmony.

Challenges faced in FY23 included senior management retention, availability and cost of new technology, and amended legislation governing vehicle intervention controls for diesel-powered trackless mobile machinery.

Loss of Life, Fatal Injury frequency rate, Lost Time Injury frequency rate

  FY23 FY22 FY21 FY20 FY19
Loss of life (number of people)          
Group 6 13 11 6 11
South Africa 6 13 11 6 11
Papua New Guinea — — — — —
Loss of life injury frequency rate (per million hours worked)  
Group 0.06 0.13 0.11 0.08 0.12
Lost-time injury frequency rate (per million hours worked)  
Group 5.49¹ 5.65¹ 6.18² 6.33² 6.16²
South Africa 5.74 5.9 6.46 6.69 6.48
Papua New Guinea 0.34 0.17 — 0.77 0.35
  1. Assured by independent assurance providers in the current year. See ESG Report 2023
  2. Independently assured in prior periods.

FUTURE FOCUS AREAS

The group will continue to sustain the Thibakotsi programme as part of our DNA. Surveys will rank leadership maturity, living our values and employee engagement in terms of lessons learnt and support as we strive to become mine safety leaders.

In South Africa, progress on our Thibakotsi journey will be mapped by operational stock-take feedback to our executive committee. Employee engagements will include robust discussions about authentic ownership of the programme to enable the development of a Thibakotsi sustainability framework for the next three years.

In Papua New Guinea, as part of our focus on behavioural risk awareness, controls and psychological factors, we are focused on the delivery of risk awareness and perception coaching across all mining operations, processing, site services and environment teams over the next 12 months.

In Australia, we are preparing and implementing our safety and health management system, initially focusing on exploration activities and associated documentation. We are also in the process of procuring site emergency response equipment and an ambulance.

CASE STUDIES

Further information

See discussions on our approach to safety and related performance.

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