Safety excellence

Common issues and opportunities

The field of health and safety is paramount in all industries – not only as a function but as a set of commitments and behaviours. In the pursuit of safety excellence, clients commonly face issues and opportunities such as:

• Defining an effective strategy and knowing how to make the transition
• Avoiding getting bogged down in theory without an informed, pragmatic approach
• Understanding the factors driving current performance and identifying the actions to drive improvement and how to incorporate those into wider operations
• Receiving audit results that identify issues or improvements – particularly to maintain a licence to operate – but not knowing how or where to start, or having the right experience on hand, to achieve the required change
• Finding independent and experienced people to perform investigations or incident root cause analysis, particularly when urgency is paramount
• Converting the safety (and environmental) gains of digital transformation and automation initiatives and managing change during these transitions without a loss of safety performance
• Facing resourcing gaps, whether via under-resourcing areas such as strategy, overloading personnel or simply lacking the required expertise
• Being unclear about what good looks like and how to apply best practice efficiently and effectively in a way that integrates with operations
• Addressing unclear roles and blurred responsibilities between strategy, planning and execution, including safety personnel getting drawn into operational work
• Overcoming a shortage of skilled people, often resulting in engaging personnel who are unfamiliar with the mining and resources industries
• Managing a high-quality function with stretched support, particularly for smaller organisations
• Balancing the requirements of multiple stakeholders between operations, wider business demands, external regulatory bodies and support team goals
• Integrating changes without creating non-value-adding work elsewhere in the business.

In seeking improvement, it’s all too easy to overlook, undervalue or under-resource areas such as clearly understanding how to deliver an integrated safety function, including encouraging a service-provider mentality. The prevalence of siloes compounds issues and these take considerable time and effort to break down. The key is connecting the right strategy to the right plan and an informed approach to execution – underpinned by leaders with the skills needed to drive change and improvement.

Our approach

The Minset team offers extensive experience across a broad range of operational and functional roles, so we understand the many ‘sides’ of business pillars. Our improvement offer in safety provides project-based services focused on an initiative, area or point of concern. We are here to help our clients keep their focus on managing and operating their business by addressing statutory, legal and business safety issues quickly and effectively, and demonstrating real action.

We address these as we would any continual improvement project, identifying the problem, understanding the current context, defining the desired end state and where a team wants to get to, and then mapping out the actions or steps required to get there. Our goal is to help sites achieve a step change. This includes exploring the most efficient ways to define and manage safety performance.

In contexts where we are called in to facilitate an investigation, we work on understanding what happened, where gaps exist and what the recommended improvement looks like, drawing on proven industry methods such as ICAM. This is supported by our wider skills in business improvement implementation. We also offer a niche capability in shutdown safety, drawing on our deep expertise and strength in shutdowns. Throughout all our safety improvement services, we take a pragmatic approach that balances the right ideals with a grounded understanding of the reality of delivering change. Gains are amplified by our skill in coaching and mentoring leaders.

Delivering practical, accountable, shared value

Minset’s work delivers practical value to clients in areas such as:

• Providing an independent, expert, industry-relevant capability to define and execute change
• Providing strategic resourcing, particularly where the required expertise is not available on site or within an organisation, to achieve a step change
• Taking the right workload off safety people so they can focus on day-to-day requirements while enabling an improved service
• Helping teams refine their current practices while bringing in new systems and processes
• Defining a safety strategy, management systems and processes that work by clearly establishing the right standards, planning how to make the transition and guiding execution
• Mobilising action, particularly where a team has stalled in implementing improvements
• Knowing how to fully assess the impact of any change to set up implementation for success
• Integrating systems to ensure they become the way a team works, not a bolt-on
• Ensuring improvement is realistic and tightly linked to, and integrated with, what an operation is trying to achieve and its operational processes and requirements
• Offering a strong understanding of broader operational realities, how to add value, and how to remove waste and avoid disconnected safety processes
• Upskilling safety leaders and supervisors to reach a set standard by helping them understand what good looks like, where gaps exist and what steps to take
• Upskilling leaders in leading through influence, rather than authority, and changing their mindset to that of a service provider.