Re-imagining safety at the frontline

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Safety is our most important Value and we are constantly working towards eliminating serious injuries and fatalities.

Our new approach to Fatal Risk Management (FRM) is frontline-focused and simplifies risk management at the coal face for workers.

FRM has been rolled out across Anglo American's operations and Exploration projects in Australia.

Fatal Risk (also commonly known as Critical Risk Management) is not a new concept for the global mining industry and learnings from our people, peers and industry experts has informed our approach.

Many have cautioned that they’ve rarely seen programs like FRM achieve its objective without overburdening the frontline and as such, we’ve chosen to cultivate FRM from within to leverage the insights and experiences of our frontline workers to ensure we have the best chance of getting it right.

Anglo American's Fatal Risk Management program is re-imagining safety for frontline workers.

A frontline approach

Through a bottom-up approach, we’ve empowered our frontline workforce to shape FRM so it would resonate and integrate across our operations.

Embedding frontline workers into our project team - from operators, supervisors and superintendents and including exploration and contractors - not only ensured we had a diversity of perspectives to co-design our risk assessment tools but also helped us integrate FRM into daily shift routines.

Our new FRM tools have been deliberately designed to be simple and easy to use.

We started by ensuring our people could universally identify which of the 14 Fatal Risks they might be exposed to – regardless of the site they are on.

“These frontline tools are the foundation of the whole Fatal Risk movement and are the first and natural step for frontline workers,” said Lil Shanley, a member of the FRM Frontline team and Longwall Operator at our Moranbah North operation.

“I’ve worked across almost the whole Bowen Basin and the simple tools are the ones that work best.

"If it’s too complex, people don’t understand it and they won’t complete it properly for fear of getting it wrong.

"There is nothing confusing about these new tools and the people using it are the ones who have come up with them. I am proud of being able to make the decisions that are going to become a legacy.”

It’s this process and frontline engagement model that highlights FRM’s unique point of difference and ensures it’s not regarded as “just another initiative” that will come and go.

“As we embark on the future of safety in this business, we know one thing to be true: the solution had to be designed by frontline workers, for frontline workers,” said Dan van der Westhuizen, CEO of Anglo American in Australia.

“We’ve worked with key members of the FRM frontline team and engaging with our operations to design the critical and foundational tools. We wanted to ensure our frontline workers have what they need in their hand at 3am – when they need it most – to help protect themselves and their teammates against Fatal Risk.”

Our 14 Fatal Risks

We define Fatal Risk as something that has the potential to immediately kill a worker on the frontline during a task. Sadly, these Fatal Risks represent a circumstance where someone in our business or in our industry has tragically lost their life in the past.

Under each Fatal Risk are 3-5 Fatal Controls which are the crucial few controls that need to be in place to help prevent a fatality on the frontline. Importantly to meet the criteria of being a ‘Fatal Control’, any worker must have the ability to implement and check that the control is operating as intended– with the power truly being in a frontline worker’s hands.

“If you asked me until recent times, I would have struggled to identify the Fatal Controls most relevant to me – we have over 1,000 critical controls on file. With FRM, we have narrowed that down and now the controls relate specifically to the Fatal 14, which is so practical and user-friendly,” said Shaun Dando, Safety Leadership Practices Coach at Grosvenor.

“I look at that list of 14 and can put faces and names to those risks. I have lost workmates to a number of them, so there is a real reason to have them; it is so we all go home safely – every day,” Shaun said.

Importance of the leadership shadow

The true success of FRM lies in the hearts and minds of our frontline workforce. For us to really achieve a step change in our safety performance, our workers not only need practical tools but the motivation to do something differently and the knowledge they will be supported to stop a job when controls are absent or not working as they should.

Gaps in understanding what critical means, or not wanting to impact production, have historically been the drivers behind workers taking shortcuts, not speaking up or stopping a job.

“The leadership shadow is incredibly important. As leaders we have to role model behaviour that celebrates and rewards people for stopping to check what is safe,” said Matt Stevens, General Manager Dawson Mine.

“For these new tools to last the test of time, we need to make sure our workforce feels empowered to stop and speak up which helps to bring our Safety Leadership Practices to life,” Matt said.

In addition to the FRM frontline tools, we have also introduced the FRM verification system to ensure leaders are well equipped to verify Fatal Control performance at the frontline and can act on data accordingly.

Fatal Control check questions have been integrated into our VFL (Visible Felt Leadership) in-field engagement routine. Data collected is turned into dashboards with meaningful insights helping to drive better decisions and actions to manage each site’s risk exposure and trends.

A maturity assessment tool and process has also been developed as the program moves from implementation phase into embedment at each site, with the outcome of the process being an agreed action plan at each site to continue to improve and close any gaps.

Through this work we’re not just shaping the future of mining, we’re re-imagining mining to improve people’s lives.