Safety
Our safety vision is that "Together we will create an injury and illness free workplace where everyone goes home safe and healthy each day of their working life".
Safety is not about numbers - it's about people. The policies, standards, programmes and targets we set are important. While they have moved our performance forward in recent years, they alone will not deliver our safety vision.
We are progressing on our journey toward a zero harm culture where everyone knows that they make a difference and where all employees and contractors have the knowledge, competence and desire to work safely.
We concentrate on six core areas on our journey to zero harm. These focus areas are designed to ensure we have the strong leadership, the engagement of employees, and the effective systems needed to achieve our safety vision. We make sure we learn from incidents that occur, and exhibit the behaviours that demonstrate our Group wide commitment to safety.
Leaders are trained and demonstrate genuine commitment to improve safety
Strong leadership impacts all elements of safety performance by demonstrating, encouraging and rewarding safe, desired behaviours. It is important to ensure that leaders understand their role and have the right capability and competency. We have established a Safety Leadership Development Programme to develop these skills, including leading HSE interactions with people doing their daily tasks.
Our leaders need to believe that zero harm is achievable. Their messages should be consistent and our leadership teams across the Group need opportunities to align around the issues and the barriers they face in achieving zero harm. Our Front Line Leadership Programme includes a "leading for zero harm module" to promote discussions around such issues.
All incidents are reported, thoroughly investigated and learnings shared
We need to ensure that the culture at all our operations is one that encourages the reporting of incidents, including near misses; establishes a consistent approach to incident investigation including consideration of cultural, organisational and leadership influences; and supports learning.
Employees are actively involved in all areas of safety management
Employees who feel they have a worthwhile contribution to make and that they are valued are much more likely to participate in the programmes being run. Those using the safety processes and procedures are better placed to suggest improvements than anyone else, and businesses should develop processes that actively encourage the participation of employees and contractors in all aspects of safety management.
Employees see and manage the risks in the workplace
Safety risk management is a core element of our safety strategy. The HSEQ MS defines a framework for risk evaluation that enables assessments to match the context, nature and scale of the risks being evaluated.
The Semi-Quantitative Risk Assessment (SQRA) process is the principal Group wide safety risk management programme for analysing process safety and other major safety hazards (eg mining, marine, aviation). It provides a structured and rigorous approach to the identification and evaluation of the higher consequence/lower frequency hazards. A guiding principle of the application of SQRA within Rio Tinto is to drive focus and understanding of the adequacy of the critical controls that we rely upon to control major safety hazards. We seek to increase our capability to expose critical risks and engage people in mitigating them
World class systems that drive us to a zero harm culture
The HSEQ MS aims to ensure that there is a systematic identification, management and improvement of the areas of the business than can present risk. We recognise the benefits of a regulatory environment that is proactive, stringent and strongly implemented and the risks posed to the business by weak regulation. Our operations manage many variables and it is necessary to ensure that all decisions associated with cost, schedule and production consider the impact on HSE culture and reputation at a business and Group level, that all aspects of the HSEQ MS have been effectively implemented, and that a rigorous process is used to validate the consistency and sustainability of these processes.
Behaviour that is aligned with our values is expected and actively encouraged
Decisions we take and the behaviours we exhibit need to demonstrate our commitment to safety.
