Safety and health

In many ways 2008 has been a seminal year for the management of safety and health within AngloGold Ashanti. And it is one in which the group’s efforts to eliminate accidents at work have delivered significant results across the company.

In 2008, there were 14 fatal accidents within the group, 11 of which were in South Africa. In 2007, there were 34 fatalities, with 27 of these in South Africa. While the loss of each and every life is a tragic occurrence, there is reason to be positive about the progress made both in the substantial improvement year-on-year and over the past five years. While significant improvements were reported in the Fatal Injury Frequency Rate (FIFR), which decreased by 57% in 2008, the decrease in the Lost Time Injury Rate (LTIR) at 11% has not been as encouraging.

Key to the transformation of the group’s safety and health culture has been the reaffirmation by CEO Mark Cutifani that safety is the group’s first value.

“Safety is not something that we do as a separate step within a process. Safety is about how we think and operate; it sits within and around everything we say and do. Values can only be defined and led from the top – safety is our first value. Safety sets the context for our leadership messages, it guides our leadership behaviours and the definition of work practices in our workplaces. We are reinforcing the focus on how we work by introducing hazard assessment and looking at our work processes through the lens of safety and associated risk management actions.

“As we say in AngloGold Ashanti: ‘people are the business…our business is people’. Our focus on safety reflects the respect we have for each other and the desire we have to create the leading mining company – together,” he says.

Safety is our first value

Adds Cutifani, “We are working on four fronts in our quest to eliminate all accidents from the workplace:

• first, we are focused on making sure safety is in front of everyone, every day, and that this perspective shapes every decision we make;
• second, we must learn to look for hazards and understand what it takes to reduce the risk to a level that can be managed – this follows the first step in which we are saying it is acceptable to stop work if an area is unsafe;
• third, we must put in place and manage according to a set of systems that ensure we are linked to achieve safety in all of our working areas – this binds and links our activities to ensure we achieve safe outcomes; and
• finally, every step we take as leaders must reinforce our safety message – not only must we talk to change we must also be the change.”

Good progress was made in inculcating a safety and health culture within the group during the year, with significant emphasis being placed on safe work practices at all levels of the company. In South Africa this was evident in the implementation of the ‘Care’ initiative, an organisational change approach that has as its base the way in which all employees (both managers and workers) value and respect the aspirations, capacities and needs of one another, and those of the company. The ‘Care’ initiative is not a mass communications campaign – rather it involves the development of individual and team-based compacts of expectations, and delivery against these; included within this compact is the responsibility and accountability for safety and health by management and employees alike. The ‘Care’ initiative has been supported, in turn, by a programme to encourage and empower employees to stop working in places that they feel are unsafe. See case study: New approach to safety and health in South Africa pays dividends, on page 170.

“Changing an organisation’s culture depends to a large degree on visible leadership,” says John McEndoo, Group Safety Manager. The combination of safety and health into one portfolio, reporting to the Executive Vice President, Sustainability, indicates the continued integration of this discipline and the increased level of focus placed upon it. The group has scheduled a dedicated quarterly meeting of executives that focuses only on safety and health, ensuring that safety and health are indeed at the top of the agenda.

“Clear direction has been given from the top that safety considerations override production and all other aspects of the business,” says McEndoo.

Occupational Health and Safety Leadership Transformation Project

Significant emphasis continues to be placed on developing a strategic approach to the management of safety and health within AngloGold Ashanti in 2008. The Occupational Health and Safety Leadership Transformation Project was initiated in April 2008 to develop a global occupational health and safety blueprint. This initiative is aligned with broader business transformation initiatives currently under way within the company, and is being supported by Australian safety consultancy ZEAL, which has worked with other global mining companies.

Says Cutifani, “I think it is always important to have these types of processes facilitated by an external group – they have a different perspective and will see things we may possibly not see. The idea is to bring everyone’s views into the process without having them filtered by internal groups that will have a specific or personal perspective which tends to shape their listening and reporting of results.”

There are two parallel streams of investigation that make up this project.

• The first is the development of an understanding of where the company is today in terms of systems, both internal and external, (for example, regulatory systems), organisational culture and structure.
• The second stream has been looking at the environment in which the company and the industry are likely to be operating in 10 to 20 years’ time, in terms of global scenarios incorporating political, environmental, social and other aspects, plus operating parameters (such as location, degree of mechanisation, depth, level of production etc.) and specific safety and health issues related to these. Techniques such as scenario planning, using a wide range of inputs developed by a variety of role-players, including management, organised labour, universities, and external mining associations, have been used to build a credible picture of the organisation and workforce of the future.

The first stream has been a very intensive process, with assessments having been carried out in Argentina, Brazil, Ghana, Guinea and South Africa. In respect of assessing the occupational health and safety culture, more than 60 in-depth one-on-one interviews were conducted with senior managers; and focus groups have been held with around 270 employees representing management, supervisors and unions, as well as with selected ‘rock-face’ employees. The focus groups addressed issues according to the aspects that are done well, those that are done poorly, priority areas for improvement and the forces in the mining industry that will shape safety and health in the future. Over 3,000 questionnaires were completed and analysed covering a wide range of issues relating to employees’ perceptions of safety and health matters. Organisational structures have also been analysed, and a comprehensive review of all systems relating to occupational health and safety, both internal and external, has been carried out in these countries.

In terms of the second stream, scenario planning workshops were held at an operational level in four countries, followed by a group scenario planning workshop in December 2008 which included external experts, such as a representative from the International Labour Organisation’s ISSA mining section, as well as representatives from organised labour, regulators and politicians.

The project is scheduled for completion at the end of the first quarter in 2009, although some preliminary findings have been made. It is anticipated that the project will position the company correctly in respect of its occupational safety and health management and performance, and recommendations will be rolled out from the second quarter of 2009.

Implementation of OHSAS ahead of target

A significant development during the year has been the steady implementation of the OHSAS 18001 safety and management standard, a process that the group embarked on just two years ago. As previously reported, 50% of mining operations were certified as compliant with the OHSAS 18001 standard during 2007. All remaining mines achieved certification during 2008, ahead of the schedule set in 2007. In addition, the OHSAS 18001 standard was implemented at the Tropicana project in Australia. To assist mines in making the best use of this standard and to ensure a greater degree of consistent application across the group, an internal safety and health systems and practice protocol was developed and implemented during the year. The protocol allows for internal and external assessment and provides some assurance that not only are the systems developed and documented, but that they are being practised. The protocol is intranet-based and is available in  English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The intention is that this assessment should be conducted at six-monthly intervals. Most operations had carried out at least one cycle of this assessment by the end of 2008 in addition to their OHSAS certification audits. See case study: Health and Safety’s Systems and Practice Protocol.

Learning from our mistakes

As part of the occupational health and safety transformation project, the systems and techniques used in incident investigation have been questioned. A large sample of lost time injury investigations was re-analysed to better understand the basic causes of these accidents and to try to learn from these so as to reduce repeat incidents. While fatal accidents are reviewed in depth by corporate level personnel and information from the accidents is shared across the group, this has not historically been the case with respect to lost time injuries. As lost time injuries have not seen the same degree of decrease in the year under review, this area is seen as a major opportunity for improvement.

Some 500 responses by management to each of the accidents that were reviewed were classified. Typically such responses are:

• individual, where the response to the incident is aimed at people and circumstances in close proximity to the accident;
• systemic, where the systems resulting in immediate failures are examined and reviewed; and
• organisational, where the issue is recognised as requiring an organisational approach, such as cultural or policy changes.

This investigation has indicated that a major opportunity exists to improve the outputs from incident and accident investigations and a multi-faceted strategy for this will form an integral part of the global occupational health and safety blueprint.

Plans for 2009

While good progress has been made in reducing the number of occupational fatalities during the year, AngloGold Ashanti remains intent on eliminating all fatal accidents and, in the short term, reducing the LTIR by 20% year-on-year. The feedback from the research stage of the leadership transformation project is expected to be developed, in consultation with key stakeholders, into a practical blueprint for safety and health in a way that is specific enough to ensure central leadership and consistency in application, but which caters for the differences in risk and circumstances at an operational level. It is expected that the application of this blueprint will deliver a step-change in safety and health performance in the short to medium term, as well as to start equipping the group for safety and health challenges in the longer term.

Concludes Cutifani, “We treat each other with dignity and respect and manage every activity as though we were working with family. In the AngloGold Ashanti family, safety will be our most important barometer in judging whether we are creating a sustainable and continually improving business for and with every employee.”