Leadership on safety
The Rio Tinto safety principles require that managers demonstrate visible, felt leadership and commitment. Executive and senior managers from the board to first line management are required to be accountable, committed and make every effort to engage employees and contractors to lead by example and to eliminate all unsafe behaviour and conditions from their areas of responsibility.
The implementation of four Safety Leadership Panel Initiatives continued across the Group. These remain the key focus areas for 2006 to embed skills and behaviours throughout operations.
Safetyleadership induction is a "toolbox" for business units to improve the quality of safety leadership at all levels of the organisation. The toolbox contains a self assessment tool, a core training module, and a list of key safety behaviours and expectations for all leaders. A key aspect is self assessment with a manager and the development of a prioritised summary of areas for improvement. This process is incorporated into a business unit's performance review process and related training and development plans for employees.
Our 2006 safety plan requires all businesses to provide the induction for people new or moving into leadership roles. This outlines key responsibilities, recommends a process of self assessment with a manager, and develops a prioritised summary of areas for improvement. Coaching and development is expected to be achieved by progressive "learning by doing".
It is intended that skill levels be enhanced with "learning by doing". Leadership is the keystone of any successful safety system. Safety management is integrated into all the activities of the organisation and Rio Tinto continues to encourage management to actively demonstrate commitment to safety.
Improving our incident investigation process. Incident investigations are an important element of an effective safety system. Failure of people, equipment, the work environment and management cause the majority of incidents. Effective incident investigations determine how and why failures in the management system may have occurred. This can help prevent future incidents. To ensure a consistent approach to the investigation of critical incidents around the Group we have chosen the TapRooT® Methodology.
Our focus is also to improve the quality of the Safety interaction process. To reduce on the job incidents we are developing a consistent approach to allow management and employees to participate in identifying and encouraging the practice of safe behaviour and identifying hazards. This framework covers the identification and understanding of the safe and less safe behaviours of a task, conducting effective interactions with employees, providing feedback that reinforces safe behaviours, and gaining a commitment to change less safe behaviours. The collection of observation data is important to provide trends on safe and less safe behaviours that have been exhibited to identify management behaviours that may be systemic in nature and to recognise successes and achievement of the management system.
Understanding the hazards and risks prior to commencing work has been identified as a critical area. Studies suggest that most incidents could have been prevented by the person involved had they had some help to recognise the hazards prior to starting the task . During the year businesses have used a set of guidelines to evaluate the process they have in place to ensure it meets certain principles. To better understand and manage the critical and high risks at our operations it is planned that our sites complete the update to the risk registers based on a quantifiable risk assessment process.
Support for these initiatives has been provided by the Safety Leadership Panel which is led by a senior executive and supported by managing directors from the business.
Back to top