Health and safety

Health and safety are core values that underpin everything we do. We strive to maintain a healthy and safe working environment for our employees, contractors, and visitors, while enhancing the physical health and psychosocial wellbeing of our people.

MinRes is focused on maintaining a safe working environment for our employees, contractor partners and the communities where we operate.

We are committed to complying with all health and safety laws and regulations governing our activities and have developed a suite of comprehensive policies, standards and procedures to guide compliance.

We follow a five-step strategy to ensure safety remains our number one priority across all areas of our business:

Leadership: Highly engaged, visible and proactive safety leadership at all levels.
Operational discipline: Unwavering discipline and commitment to perform through training, awareness and enhanced governance.
Fit-for-purpose systems: Continually improve and simplify the health and safety framework and processes to ensure they remain fit for purpose and eliminate any barriers to success.
Critical risk management: Ensuring critical risk activities are identified and managed with clear accountabilities for verification of critical controls.
Healthy people and workplaces: Active investment in the health and wellbeing of our people through education and initiatives. We have a clear focus on the wellbeing of our people, which encompasses physical and mental health.

As our business grows, we continue to focus on providing our people with the necessary skills, systems and processes to perform their roles safely.

We are committed to further safety performance improvements and have in place the leadership, culture and systems to enable that journey to continue.

Our health and safety management system establishes a clear set of values and objectives to reduce the likelihood and severity of incidents and ensure MinRes complies with company and regulatory requirements for managing workplace health and safety.

Supported by a dedicated team of health and safety professionals, our system includes policies, standards and procedures tailored to meet specific business needs, assisting our business units and operations to effectively manage health and safety risks.

The health and safety management system is also continuously reviewed in line with internal performance data, internal and external feedback, and legislative updates – ensuring information remains accurate and relevant to the safety of our people, contractor partners and visitors.

All sites, projects and departments have a dedicated safety representative who actively engages in health and safety matters at a site-level, including reported hazards, near misses and safety performance.

A weekly safety and training notification is sent to all operational teams with internal safety alerts and other health, safety and training notifications.

This includes toolbox topic documents for discussion at pre-start and toolbox meetings for the following week.

Toolbox topics have included identifying, assessing and controlling risks, electrical awareness, road safety, noise-induced hearing loss, tyre fires and explosions, isolation and tagging, and sustaining nightshift and fatigue.

Worker health and safety meetings at project sites are also held each month, with strong safety performances recognised through safety achievement certificates and individual or team awards.

To ensure effective communication and consultation on relevant health and safety matters, our operations will look to:

provide all relevant information as early as practicable to all stakeholders and to management teams with responsibility for health and safety to ensure they have sufficient information to make well-informed decisions
consider the views of employees and contractors and provide them with the opportunity to contribute to the decision-making process regarding workplace health and safety
provide employees who may be affected by decisions that relate to their health and safety with an opportunity to express their views and understand the reasons for the decisions undertaken
facilitate regular health and safety meetings, such as prestart and toolbox meetings to discuss and promote safety performance
supply health and safety information upon request and presented in easy-to-understand language and format
assist elected health and safety representatives so far as is reasonably practicable to support our workforce.

MinRes is committed to creating environments where employees can enjoy rewarding and fulfilling professional working relationships, differences are celebrated, and free from inappropriate behaviour including bullying, discrimination, harassment and workplace violence and aggression.

Our Safe and Respectful Behaviours Procedure defines and explains key terms relating to safe and respectful workplace behaviour and provides information on responsibilities and expectations as well as education and options for raising concerns.

Living our values means supporting each other, showing respect in our interactions and doing our best to consider things from someone else’s perspective. We encourage everyone in our workforce to be active bystanders by showing up, standing up and speaking up when witnessing impropriate or unacceptable behaviour.

Any person in our business who has witnessed or experienced sexual harassment, sexual assault or any behaviour that doesn’t align with our values or Code of Conduct is encouraged and supported to report through internal channels or externally through our confidential whistleblowing service.

We maintain site-specific induction packages, which can be completed prior to arriving on site, featuring site-specific information and supporting a streamlined transition to site.

MinRes continues to review our training processes, conducting a needs analysis of our systems, requirements and onboarding process for all personnel joining the business.

Minimum and recommended training requirements are identified for specific job roles to ensure workers, supervisors and managers are suitably experienced and qualified to perform their work.

We assess the competency of our workforce to meet safety requirements through our Verification of Competency Procedure, which ensures:

employees have the required skills and knowledge to successfully achieve their job scope safely
employees are competent to successfully complete their job scope to the required standard
we comply with all legislative, organisational, industry and client requirements.

MinRes has thorough processes for hazard identification, risk assessment and incident management.

Our Hazard and Risk Management Procedure defines the minimum requirements to identify, analyse, evaluate, control, monitor and review occupational hazards and risks within the business.

Defining risk consequence levels, likelihood, risk ratings and a hierarchy of controls ensure consistent application across the business.

We identify all principal mining hazards (PMH) specific to our operations, in line with new provisions in the Work Health and Safety (WHS) Mines Regulations 2022.

To ensure a consistent approach to identifying and assessing a PMH, we implement a Principal Mining Hazard Management Plan framework across our mining operations.

Facilitators of hazard and risk assessment processes must be trained and competent in the tools and techniques used.

Our workforce undertakes compulsory training on the task-based assessment tools in use. We evaluate the effectiveness of our risk assessment process to mitigate hazards and ensure continuous improvement.

We also have a clear focus on near-miss reporting. We believe learning from these events is essential to helping prevent reoccurrence and continually improve our safety culture and performance.

Our contracting partners are an important part of our workforce and are integral to the safe delivery of high-quality products to our customers.

Our Contractor Management Procedure outlines the process for verifying that contractor and subcontractor groups have the necessary skills, resources and equipment to safely undertake work activities assigned by MinRes.

Several key processes are followed when engaging with our contracting partners, ensuring compliance with our standards and agreed obligations and responsibilities.

Key elements to successful contractor engagement at MinRes include:

a scope of work submission of a Safety Management Plan
completion of Contractor Authorisation to Commence Work and Close Out Form
completion of a Contractor Induction Checklist
monitoring performance.

Additionally, we work closely with contracting partners, monitoring their performance and ensuring safe execution through our contractor safety interaction process. This process supports the implementation of our Contractor Safety Management System.