What exactly is a ‘safety culture’? How is one achieved (and is it even possible)? What is the link between leadership and safety culture? As a result of the plethora of answers to these questions, there is also diversity of approaches to safety culture improvement within mining. The LEAD model is an integrated and evidence-based framework that focusses on the leadership and team work practices required to build a safety culture.</p .
Freely available through the Safety Leadership at Work program, the LEAD model and toolkit are designed to empower organisations regardless of size or industry to achieve positive safety culture outcomes. Developed through a partnership between academia (Curtin University and University of Queensland), government (Workplace Health and Safety Queensland), and industry (including the Sustainable Minerals Institute), the LEAD model has been operationalised as a practical toolkit.
A cohort of 12 workplaces representing a diverse snapshot of different sectors (including the mining industry) participated in the design, delivery, and evaluation of the LEAD toolkit. In addition to presenting the LEAD model, my presentation will also describe the main phases and resources within the LEAD toolkit, and present a short case-study around the outcomes achieved through this project.
A proactive safety culture is the desired end state for Anglo American’s Dawson Mine. The journey relies upon the initiation of a strong system to promote embedding the desired safety behaviours within the organisation.
At Dawson Mine, this system is “Recognition and Reward Scheme”. The scheme relies on hazard reporting and innovation drives, aligning with the core values of Safety and Innovation. Hazard reporting and associated rectification is critical to improve safety ownership. Prior to implementation, 60% of hazards were reported by the general workforce. This has now increased to 90%, with a total increase in hazard reporting of 20%. The success of the scheme can be attributed to two main factors; firstly, an easy to use system, responsive to feedback, and secondly an immediate reward implication, with those crews achieving high rates of genuine hazard notification receiving recognition.
The second success of the scheme is the increase in innovation from the workforce. Innovations are submitted to the site’s Safety, Health and Environment Committee with nominees and award recipients celebrated quarterly across the site.
The “Recognition and Reward Scheme” develops a culture of intervention and ‘speaking up’, encouraging employees not to be a bystander but be fully involved in behavioural safety.
Ian Hawkins
Seam Gas Manager, Anglo American – Moranbah North Mine
Minimising risk to our people is Anglo American’s number one priority. Anglo American has implemented a system to improve the control of works being conducted on the surface to support the underground operations.
Recognising that unplanned work can often be the most unsafe, Moranbah North operation has taken advantage of the existing, proven underground planning tool and processes (Fewzion) and aligned the surface operations to these processes.
The surface area of the mining lease has been split into geographical zones with a zone controller responsible for each zone.
All activities in each zone are planned within a shared database (Fewzion) and managed and scheduled through planning meetings and agreed processes.
Any break-in or unplanned work is assessed independently by the activity owner and zone controller prior to approval to proceed is granted.
Zoning of surface works provides confidence that:
All surface work activities are planned and scheduled, minimising the need for break-in and unplanned work
Permits to Work are in place, with associated risk assessment and hazard identification completed
Simultaneous works are identified – minimising conflicting work areas
All work is communicated to all surface workers – maximising awareness
Break-in work is effectively managed, as it is planned through the scheduling process.
Graham Houldsworth
Principal Advisor – Strategy and Compliance, Glencore Copper Assets
Andrew Russell
Managing Director, Actrua Performance Cultures
Over the course of the past two and a half years Glencore’s North Queensland Copper Operations have developed and implemented a new generation of integrated safety programs that combine behavioural and system based approaches. Initially a project designed to align best practices in the group and to re-invigorate a focus on behavioural based safety programs, a series of iterations has achieved a suite of integrated and aligned pre-start meetings, leadership development programs and common language for the entire workforce.
Partnering with Performance Culture partner, Actrua, a model of co-creation and joint facilitation has allowed passionate employees to develop and own programs that are consistently applied and tailored to the cultural nuances of a large and complex operation spanning multiple geographies.
This presentation aims to showcase the program that has been developed, to share the processes undertaken during development and provide insight into the changes in strategic direction and thinking that were required to make the program a success.
James Pearce
Advocate, Black Lung Victims Support Group
The re-emergence of Dust Diseases in Queensland’s coal industry is having a devastating effect on workers, their families and mining communities. More than 100 employees have been diagnosed as suffering from different forms of pneumoconiosis, predominantly Black Lung and silicosis. There are many more Victims being regularly identified.
While the main challenge facing our entire industry is the effective prevention of Dust Diseases in our coal mines, the identification of all Victims is a moral obligation on all stakeholders in the industry. This involves not only world’s best practice testing of the present workforce but also of those who have retired from the industry and those who have left it before retiring.
While prevention and identification of Black Lung are essential, the most pressing issue at the present time is the treatment and health care of those who have been, and will continue to be, Victims of these Dust Diseases. This paper on behalf of Black Lung Victims will outline our proposals for how the industry working with government can provide for the life-long medical care needed for the best possible quality of life for sufferers. We owe them at least that.
Behavioural Safety is helping many organisations make inroads into improving safety performance.
Founded on decades of psychology research, behavioural safety positively reinforces target behaviours. By interacting in a positive manner, the studies indicate behavioural change is initiated.
Interactions occur between people and is often called a ‘safety observation’. Safety observations are, in many cases, documented into a system to scoreboard the number and type of behaviours observed.
Scoreboards focus on how many observations occur, rather than why behaviours occur. Evaluating the effect of an interaction, assessing the behavioural change and its repeatability, is paramount in behavioural safety.</p .
Powerful algorithms have been developed using the latest data science techniques, to assess the effect of interventions, like safety conversations, on large groups. These techniques are widely used in Marketing/Advertising, Finance/Insurance, Healthcare, Law Enforcement, and Politics.
Safety conversations are a window into the individual interactions. With certain data, it is possible to identify positive, negative or neutral interactions, and the effect over time.
This paper presents a robust and novel approach to assess sentiment analysis of documented safety observations, to predict the persuasive effects of leaders on their groups, and the resultant safety outcomes.
Warren Smith
Executive Consultant, Dekra Insight Australia
Organisations commonly put controls in place to address typical workplace exposures that can cause harm. They also attempt to make use of human performance tools and other measures that aim to address human error. Unfortunately, these efforts often don’t yield tangible results as evidenced through operational upsets and unplanned events.
This session will explore Brain-Centred Hazards and will demonstrate how accurate, consistent and sustainable hazard recognition and situational awareness can only be achieved by first addressing these Brain-Centred Hazards in our workplaces. In particular, the audience will explore the difference between traditional hazard identification and an approach that increases deep noticing for optimal hazard ID.
Additionally, the audience will learn the hidden dangers of cognitive fatigue and how it diminishes situational awareness and hazard recognition, and simultaneously produces higher risk-taking actions that can lead to injury, upset, catastrophe, or reputational damage.
There has been considerable research (empirical studies and academic papers) during the last 10 years investigating human decision making.
The most disruptive discovery is that what we think of as a deliberate choice (an “active” conscious decision) happens fundamentally in the subconscious and is fed to the conscious mind very late in the neurological process. This is why it feels like we only make conscious decisions.
Three thinking principles help explain human decision making and enable us to understand human behaviour better.
These are automatic thinking (autopilot), social thinking and mental thinking models. As such, they also provide valuable clues to determine how we can future-proof efforts by organisations to make behaviours safer.
The lessons from these three thinking principles can be applied to three different layers in organisations:
Leadership
Teams
Individuals
The latest findings from studies in neuroscience, behaviour science, cognitive behavioural science and neuropsychology are used to explain how safety behaviour can be influenced more effectively.
Christian Young
Managing Director, Impress Solutions Pty Ltd
Safety Differently describes a movement within the safety community to change the perspective of organisations in three key areas – the definition of safety, the role of people, and the focus of the organisation.
Traditional or “normal” safety management tends to view these three areas in this way:
Safety is defined as an absence of negatives (e.g., accidents, unacceptable risk, unsafe acts, etc.)
People are a problem that must be controlled
The organisation focuses on safety as a bureaucratic accountability to those above us hierarchically
By contrast, Safety Differently views these three key areas this way:
Safety is defined by the presence of positives, such as a capacity to be successful in varying conditions
People are the solution
The organisation focuses on safety as an ethical responsibility to those who do the organisation’s messy, risky work
Safety Differently is an approach used by organisations who wish to move beyond traditional safety management.
Through the lens of Safety Differently organisations can evaluate their existing strategies and look for opportunities to alter course. This presentation will further discuss how Safety Differently can be applied within the mining context.
