The prioritising of efficient health and safety practices through operational coaching is key in embedding the required habits and work routines for consistently safe working conditions and to enhance operational excellence, highlights operational improvement management specialist OIM Consulting.

The company specifically focuses on its development of mine supervisors, whom it refers to as safety leaders.

OIM Consulting notes that supervisors in the mining sector lead about 80% of the overall workforce and highlights this aspect as a basis for changing mindsets to be increasingly safety oriented to help them become more effective as safety leaders.

OIM Consulting CEO Arjen de Bruin notes the significance of promoting role competence in ensuring that on-site mine supervisors are equipped with the ability to execute on their duties in the mining environment.

“Whatever targets you have set and whatever safety culture that you require, the supervisor is pivotal to ensuring that these are achieved. We have found that 91% of supervisors follow an unstructured and reactive approach to job execution, [while] only 17% of supervisors have the required competencies for their role, and only 42% of daily shift activities are executed effectively,” he elaborates.

OIM Consulting highlights that mine production metrics increase in accordance with the improvement of supervisor competencies and the execution of their roles.

Prevailing Safety Standards, Challenges

De Bruin notes that South Africa’s mining sector remains hierarchical, and that the individuals that are leading the sector make most of their organisational decisions without prior team consultation.

This results in mining management being mostly unable to receive feedback on safety suggestions from the people performing physical work and interacting with dangerous machinery or in sensitive environments.

Another concern involves attempts to resolve safety incidents through compliance and additional policy procedures, as opposed to changing mindsets on safety in the sector.

“Research shows that 80% of safety incidents and violations are born out of a poor safety mindset, [while] 3% can be attributed to acts of God and 17% are errors and mistakes.”

De Bruin contends that the biggest challenges in South Africa’s mining sector are attributed to a variety of risks including safety, high rates of employee burnout, elevated levels of employee distraction and over-commitment to certain tasks or responsibilities.

He notes that employees have a high chance of being harmed or injured in their working environment owing to risky decision- making, not thinking about and looking at what they are doing when performing their jobs, and demonstrating emotional, physical and mental exhaustion.

Further, the company asserts that individuals at high risk of over-commitment experience high levels of dedication and devotion to their work, but also experience high levels of exhaustion as a result of devoting too many resources towards certain aspects of work. This usually happens because of high job demands and insufficient mental, physical and emotional rest amid gruelling work demands.

Safe, Consistent Production

De Bruin highlights that the main focus of OIM Consulting’s Supervisory Development Programme is to capacitate supervisors for successful and safe mine shifts, thereby achieving safe and consistent production.

In addition, this programme equips supervisors with the required skillsets and mindsets to drive sustainable success which encompasses baseline competency and role assessments, followed by interactive classroom learning and extensive measurable on-the-ground coaching.

De Bruin says that this coaching offers the necessary depth for operational excellence and that, by reinforcing the real-life application of the principles learned in the classroom, and introducing customised tools for the mine safety environment, the consultancy can embed new habits and practices into a supervisor’s work mandate to ensure the consistent application thereof.

“Our intervention has an 80% focus on this type of operational coaching to unlock productivity benefits. It’s a hands-on, daily thing. We literally go underground, in the pits, or stand on the production plants with the supervisor to observe and understand what needs to be executed, how the leader executes and manages a team, and what the broader, cross-functional interaction looks like,” he notes.

Reflecting on the need to promote operational excellence, De Bruin notes that in multiple cases, strategy does not get implemented at the lowest operational level, as some supervisors have an inadequate understanding of the safety strategy of an organisation, leading to sub-optimal leadership.

To address this problem, OIM Consulting ensures that safety strategies are cascaded down the operations using structured meetings which focus on translating this into various on-the-ground activities.

De Bruin concludes that the company will continue to find novel ways of unlocking supervisor potential to bolster safety mechanisms throughout mining operations.