Speaking up for safety
Safety remains front and centre of everything we do as we strive to remain free of fatalities and life-changing injuries and continue to reduce our recordable injury rate.
In FY19, we continued the rollout of our Safety Transformation Plan, with NewSafe NextGen building on the strengths of previous NewSafe training.
NewSafe NextGen focuses on courage and addressing fear, creating a culture where we foster courage among our workforce and eliminate the fear of speaking up. It also introduces tools to help people make the safest decisions, reinforcing our message that everyone is a safety leader.
During FY19, we held NewSafe NextGen workshops at all sites and the Melbourne office, with 4,500 employees and permanent contractors completing training by May 2019.
Our safety transformation work is reaping rewards with Pulse Check surveys recording improvements at sites. For example, the 2019 Pulse Check at Cadia found consistent, gradual improvement in site-wide results for supervisors’ safety leadership during the past three years.
Our long-term commitment to our Safety Transformation plan will continue in FY20.
Our Safety Transformation Plan
Key Pillars
Safety is strongest when the three elements of culture, controls and systems are aligned. Our safety culture, behaviours and actions are led by NewSafe. Our Critical Control Management program puts in place the review, approval and verification steps for high-risk tasks. Process Safety Management targets wider system risks, such as operating plant designs and chemical and energy hazards.
NewSafe
Newcrest initiated the NewSafe safety culture change program in 2015 and has deployed it to all sites.
To ensure that it continues to be effective and relevant, during FY19 we developed a follow-on program to NewSafe called ‘NextGen’.
NewSafe NextGen builds on the material covered in the original NewSafe Leadership course and incorporates feedback, information and data gathered since it was initially launched. NextGen reinforces key messages relating to safety leadership and continues to encourage people to identify and speak up when unsafe behaviours and conditions are encountered. To date, approximately 90% of our workforce have attended NewSafe NextGen sessions.
Critical Control Management
Since its inception in 2016, we have completed more than 6,000 System Verifications and 700,000 Field Critical Control Checks under the CCM program. During FY19 the program continued to be strong in terms of verifications and business application at all levels. New tools enabled improved reporting and analytical capability for the CCM data. We continue to see an improvement in the percentage of CCM verifications conducted using our mobile device app. In FY19 we conducted over 1,650 System Verifications and 300,000 Field Critical Control Checks as well as our front-line Operator Critical Control Checks which are integrated into existing systems.
