Health, safety and wellbeing

Although there were no fatalities on our managed sites in 2023, in January 2024, tragically 4 team members from our Diavik mine in Canada lost their lives when a charter flight crashed on its way to the mine.

In 2023, we also continued to see fatalities more broadly across our industry, including 6 at our non-managed operations. We firmly believe all fatalities are preventable. Our focus remains on identifying, managing and, where possible, eliminating risks to ensure everyone, including partners and colleagues at our non-managed operations, goes home safely every day.

During 2023, we encountered 3 permanent damage injuries; 2 significant hand injuries at Diavik and Guinea respectively, and another at Kennecott Integrated Skarns Project, where one of our colleagues sustained a leg injury requiring amputation.

We also experienced 3 significant process safety events in 2023; 2 at Sorel-Tracy in Quebec, and one at Kennecott in Utah. We are continuing to find better ways to safely run our operations and prevent these incidents from occurring. One example is our newly developed process safety improvement plan that aims to continually improve the maturity of our management system and culture. These will continue to be implemented globally through until 2025.

Our all-injury frequency rate was 0.37 in 2023, an improvement from 2022 which was 0.40. We continue to see a disparity in safety performance for employees compared to contractors, so our focus remains on improving contractor safety by further integrating contractors into our safety culture.

Across our operations, we continue to see serious incidents where people are exposed to potentially fatal events. The main safety risks relate to falling objects, falling from heights and vehicle-related incidents. These risk areas account for 58% of the total potentially fatal incidents and remain at the forefront of our safety maturity efforts.

Mental health and wellbeing

Mental health is a core part of our safety culture. We have a responsibility to support the wellbeing of our people, beyond the traditional areas of health and safety, and we are committed to creating a work environment that is free from psychological harm.

Our employees’ mental health can be impacted by psychosocial risks at work, so we continue to strengthen our psychosocial risk management. To support an environment where everyone feels safe, respected and included, we are progressing all 26 recommendations from the Everyday Respect Report, with a focus on training leaders in building psychological safety and becoming upstanders, rectifying any unsafe facilities and building plans to make our facilities more inclusive, and providing a more people-centric response to support those impacted by harmful behaviours and disrespect.

We are a member of the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) Psychosocial Risk Management Working Group, chaired by MCA and industry partners, to improve the understanding and management of psychosocial risk within our industry.

In 2023, we continued our work to help leaders recognise psychosocial hazards; assess the risks; and implement, evaluate and monitor effective controls, just as for any other health or safety risk. We also continued embedding our mental health framework to raise awareness of mental wellbeing, reduce stigma and increase the capacity of our leaders to recognise and support individuals experiencing mental ill-health.

Aligned with our commitment to give our employees the tools and skills they need to support their mental health, we continue to provide and promote the Employee Assistance Program (EAP), our mental health toolkit and our global Peer Support Program, which includes more than 1,600 peer supporters worldwide. We also support our people through our domestic violence support programs, which cover 100% of employees.

We continued to support global mental health campaigns such as R U OK? Day and World Mental Health Day. In October 2023, we held our mental health week to support mental wellbeing and encourage our people to look out for one another. We ran a program of activities that included a comprehensive communications toolkit, packed with vital information and resources for holistic wellbeing. Our people, from graduates to the Executive Committee, shared powerful stories and commitments to mental health in a series of impactful videos. We also hosted a number of engaging regional calls addressing related wellbeing topics which have contributed to shaping a culture that prioritises mental wellbeing and breaking down stigmas. In 2023, we challenged ourselves on the role we can play in preventing suicide. This work involved understanding how we can work together as a business, improve identification of those individuals who may be at risk, and support our people and families impacted by deaths from suicide.

Occupational health

In 2023, we recorded a higher number of new occupational health illnesses compared to the previous year, with 98 (up from 70 in 2022), in line with our increased focus on medical assessments. These assessments are a key requirement in ensuring and maintaining our employees’ fitness for work, addressing legislative requirements and managing risk profiles. We continue to standardise and simplify these assessments to help improve our health performance.

We also ran 2 workshops for our global health and hygiene practitioners to share learnings, best practice and recent technology developments in the Southern and Northern hemisphere. We completed occupational and industrial hygiene monitoring at all of our operational and managed assets. This included analysis of noise, airborne particulates, gas and other contaminants that can lead to adverse health effects for our employees and contractors. This helped us to better understand our exposure profile and prioritise actions to put effective controls in place.

In 2023, we commenced a project to improve clarity and accessibility of data collected through annual surveys. This project will continue in 2024 and beyond, allowing better internal reporting of health and industrial hygiene risks at a Group level, and individually for each product group. Health monitoring remains a pivotal focus, involving the redesign of fit-for-purpose medical assessments.

The data collected over 2023 allowed for semi-quantitative assessments of risk and identified areas where we can implement or enhance control measures. Each product group worked on identifying projects within their assets which, with the support of the Health Area of Expertise, will be designed, developed and implemented to reduce exposures for our employees and contractors. We will continue to track exposure reduction projects across product groups in 2024.

Recognising the need to improve the transparency and detail of our health data, we performed a Group internal audit in 2022. We are continuing to implement the audit recommendations by working to improve the reporting of our data. These recommendations include reviewing gaps in guidance, updating our existing guidance to address these gaps, re-training our health practitioners and improving the available consolidated reports to enable further insights.

We also made improvements to our annual corporate reporting activity to ensure data collected and reported is relevant to both internal and external stakeholders.

This transparently shares our health, safety, environment, security and communities performance over a longer period of time, and builds our environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials.

HSES transformation

The health, safety, environment and security (HSES) transformation program has simplified the way we work and provided access to trusted and timely data, ultimately making our business safer. Following 3 successful pilots in Enablon™ in 2022 - a new digital tool helping us to integrate HSES data and processes into a single platform - global deployment of the core Enablon™ modules started in 2023. Today, more than 70% of the business is using Enablon™, and the final wave of deployment will be completed in early 2024. We also deployed 11 Enablon™ environment modules across all Saguenay–Lac-St-Jean sites in Quebec, Canada in 2023. Work continues to expand the capabilities of Enablon™ to support processes such as management of change, in-field safety tools and chemical management, which will drive simplification and standardisation across the Group.