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Safety

At MMG, the health and safety of our people is our first value. We work hard to embed a company-wide safety mindset reinforced by our leaders, behaviours and culture across all our sites and offices. Nothing is more important than ensuring our people can arrive home safely at the end of each day.

We have identified four key elements in developing an organisational culture that fosters a strong and effective focus on safety. The four key elements include:

  1. Leadership and culture, with sites aligned to common MMG leadership attributes.
  2. Elimination of fatalities (low probability, high consequence events) – consistent with the requirements of our Fatal Risk Standard.
  3. Prevention of injuries (high-probability events) – consistent with the requirements of our Safety, Security, Health and Environment (SSHE) Performance Standard.
  4. Application of learnings from incidents in line with the requirements of our internal safety and health standards.

Safety leadership at MMG

Safety is our first value at MMG and our approach is based on avoiding any harm to our people.

We are committed to continuous improvement in our approach to managing safety. Through our Safety Leadership Program, we strive to develop a culture where safety leadership is supported through:

  • a commitment to caring for each other and living our values;
  • building safety capability and commitment in MMG people;
  • training our people to be competent in all their tasks;
  • enabling our frontline leaders to effectively implement MMG standards and processes; and
  • continually supporting and enabling safe behaviour.

The intent of our Safety Leadership Program is to improve safety leadership behaviours in the field. Through clearly defined leadership attributes, leading to improved behaviours by all our people at our operations, we aim for all our employees to return home safely at the end of every shift.

Safe Task Management

Our SSHE Performance Standard defines the requirements for conducting work, with a particular focus on ensuring our people are trained and competent in identifying and managing hazards and completing tasks safely.

In 2021, in addition to the implementation of the SSHE Performance Standard, our focus was on the understanding and implementation of the Safe Task Management elements of the SSHE performance Standard including environmental conditions, people and resource availability, the authorisation of all permits, and assignment of tasks to those with skills and the capability to complete the work safely.

All workplace hazards are identified and managed, and tasks are reviewed to identify hazards and verify the effectiveness of task allocation through Field Task Observations (FTO). In 2021, specific FTO targets were implemented at each site, enforcing the importance of the quantity and quality of the observations.

Our people are empowered to stop a task and advise a supervisor if the task cannot be carried out safely or intervene to protect their or others’ health or wellbeing or the environment.

Fatal Risk Management

MMG’s Fatal Risk Standard describes the minimum requirements for the identification, assessment and mitigation of specific fatal risks. These risks have been identified as common across all our operations, and we work continuously to ensure all MMG people are aware of the risks – and the controls that should be in place to manage them. We manage all our material risks using our Risk Management System.

The 12 fatal risks identified across MMG are:

  • Aviation
  • Carcinogens
  • Clearance to work, isolations and permits
  • Explosives and blasting
  • Ground control
  • Guarding
  • Hazardous materials
  • Land transport of people
  • Lifting operations
  • Lightning
  • Vehicles and mobile equipment
  • Work at height

Site-specific fatal risks not covered by the Fatal Risk Standard are identified and managed using MMG’s Risk Management System. During 2021, as part of the site activities to ensure the Fatal Risk Controls were always in place, the compliance against Critical Control Executions and Critical Control Verifications were closely monitored. We require the sharing of learnings from incident investigations across all MMG sites to prevent repeat incidents within our business. It also ensures we continuously challenge the effectiveness of control design and control execution for our fatal risk critical controls.

Safety and Health reporting and investigations

Effective reporting creates opportunities to make informed decisions. We do this by, undertaking timely interventions, taking corrective actions, preventing fatalities and significant events and repeat incidents. Accordingly, the SSHE Performance Standard outlines the minimum requirements for managing safety and health events. This assists with accurate and consistent recording and reporting of authorised and meaningful safety and health data.

MMG uses a centralised electronic Incident and Event Management system (IEM) to manage events and to take corrective actions. These include incidents, near misses, high-risk hazards, legal non-compliance, inspections and audits.

We use the Incident Cause Analysis Method (ICAM) as our common approach to incident investigation. ICAM is used to assess the underlying causes of incidents. It looks at the latent organisational factors such as communication, training, incompatible objectives and change management processes. As part of the ICAM process, MMG uses a ‘Work as Intended versus Work as Normal versus Work as Done’ investigation methodology to better understand the causes of significant incidents.

We require the sharing of learnings from incident investigations across all MMG sites to prevent repeat incidents within our business. It also ensures we continuously challenge the effectiveness of control design and execution for our fatal risk critical controls.


Examples of our safety initiatives can be found in our Sustainability Reports and on wemineforprogress.com.

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