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Gold miner’s journey producing results

1st July 2022

By: Tracy Hancock

Creamer Media Contributing Editor

     

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After 14 months, South Africa’s largest gold producer by volume, Harmony, is just under halfway through its humanistic transformation journey called ‘Thibakotsi’, which aims to embed a culture of safety across its operations, says investor relations head Jared Coetzer.

“The most significant component of our safety journey remains changing human behaviour.”

Thibakotsi, which means ‘to prevent harm’ in Sotho, is one of two key components of Harmony’s safety transformation journey.

It follows the introduction of systemic or hardware solutions, which comprise the controls and processes that have been implemented across Harmony’s operations.

“For example, through the implementation of our Syncromine Optical Character Recognition solution, all checklists are converted into digitalised and actionable data and made available in real time for analysis. This has resulted in a significant reduction in overdue A-hazards.”

There is no easy solution to safety in an organisation comprising more than 48 000 people, yet Harmony is seeing results, says Coetzer, noting that the company’s lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) is, despite substantial growth over the past four years, owing to the acquisition of deep-level gold mines Moab Khotsong, in the North West, and Mponeng and related assets in Gauteng, “trending in the right direction”.

“Thibakotsi is only 14 months into being implemented in earnest. The entire risk process was assessed in December 2016 after which a safety strategy was adopted and implemented throughout Harmony. The systemic part of the safety strategy is now well-embedded and, hence, further focus is now on the humanistic component.”

Harmony’s LTIFR has improved over the past three consecutive quarters and has been consistently below the threshold of six incidents for every one-million hours worked.

“Much of the progress we have made is because we are identifying leading indicators – such as significant unwanted events – which will help prevent accidents,” explains Coetzer, emphasising that Harmony’s focus is on embedding a proactive safety culture.

Notably, some of the company’s key high-risk accident-causing agencies, such as fall-of-ground incidents and rail-bound equipment, have improved significantly.

This is evident through Harmony recording its first-ever loss-of-life-free January this year and no loss-of-life incidents recorded at its Free State operations during the calendar year so far.

However, cultural transformations such as Thibakotsi, can take between four and seven years to embed in the “hearts and minds” of employees, says Coetzer.

The journey is focused on visible-felt leadership – which adopts a unified approach with unions and closes the feedback loop with employees – while Harmony’s leaders are “walking the talk”.

Further, risk-propensity assessments focused on high-risk roles are employed to coach risk-erratic individuals and shift their profile to be consistently risk-averse. Employee engagement and leadership development are also emphasised.

A Safe Mine is a Productive Mine

“We firmly believe that by eliminating incidents we can and will improve employee productivity, but we will always prioritise safety over production,” highlights Coetzer.

Harmony reported an 11% decline in production, to 325 219 oz for the third quarter of the 2022 financial year, leaving the total gold output for the year to date at 1.1-million ounces, 460 000 oz shy of the company’s 1.56-million-ounce revised production target.

“We are confident of meeting our production guidance for the 2022 financial year,” says Coetzer, adding that the company’s openpit gold and silver mine Hidden Valley, in Papua New Guinea, is back to full production following repairs to the overland conveyor belt which was damaged in January.

“Our business improvement team is working on various productivity and safety initiatives, called S300, aimed at getting crews to safely mine 300 m² a month on average. It is important that these safety and productivity measures work hand in hand to ensure that we meet our strategic objectives,” explains Coetzer.

This year’s incidents at its Kusasalethu mine, near Carletonville, have had a limited impact on production.

An employee died on June 6 following an engineering-related incident and, before that, on May 7, four miners also died at the mine after an infrastructure-related incident, following which a safety day was held and the mine stopped operations for a day to pay respects to those who died.

“Kusasalethu is going through a very difficult patch. We are investigating the drivers behind the recent spate of tragedies to identify how we can eliminate future incidents and further loss of life,” says Coetzer.

Harmony’s single-shaft, deep-level Target 1 mine, in the Free State, has the worst safety record.

“Most of the reportable incidents at Target 1 are ‘slip and fall’, but each incident has a sizable impact on its LTIFR, owing to the modest number of employees,” explains Coetzer.

Where an impact on production owing to safety-related incidents has been felt is at Mponeng, where some high-grade panels were inaccessible following seismicity in the early stages of the 2022 financial year.

Mponeng and its related assets have been integrated into the Harmony risk management framework, but there is still work to be done. Discipline interventions are in place to help reduce potential incidents in future, he adds.

“Of our underground mines, Bambanani – one of our most challenging operations, owing to seismicity – Masimong and Joel have the best safety records year to date, of which much is attributable to the maturity of their transformation journeys,” Coetzer concludes.

Edited by Nadine James
Features Deputy Editor

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