About Saracen Mineral Holdings
Saracen is an ASX listed all-Australian gold growth company with three mines on Kalgoorlie’s doorstep. Currently delivering sector-leading financial results, the company looks to the future with investment in exploration, technology, innovation and ESG. With projected growth in production and mine life, Saracen is committed to setting the right culture to realise this increase in production safely.
Kyle DeSouza is a Senior Mining Engineer and Alternate Manager at Saracen, with 15+ years in the mining industry. Kyle champions the Saracen team’s safety culture and is passionate about employing technology to measure, understand and shape safety culture as a crucial but often missing element of overall safety performance. As one of the future safety leaders in mining, Kyle has kick-started a new era for safety at Saracen by working with Ringo to explore the missing element in safety performance.
The challenge
Like many organisations, Saracen was seeking more quantifiable and reliable data about their workers’ attitudes and opinions towards safety. Without this data, it was difficult to align their safety values and objectives with meaningful actions to address safety performance. Kyle sought a solution that would streamline gathering confidential feedback promptly from the team, including those in the field.
In better understanding the opinions of the front-line workers, Kyle sought to pin-point and address gaps in the overall safety culture in real-time.
The missing element in safety performance Ringo’s mission is to inspire our clients to understand, shape and own their safety culture. Safety science supports that organisations who understand and shape their safety culture are less likely to contribute to undesired events with a severe or fatal outcome. Many heavy industry leaders, see safety culture as complex and nebulous, an element that is hard to grasp, and consequently remains unmanaged. Too often, safety leaders focus their efforts on low-level activities and lag measures such as compliance, checklists and injury rates, neglecting the missing element – safety culture. Shaping a positive safety culture allows leaders to impact the attitudes, actions and behaviours that will ultimately improve safety performance.
When it comes to safety as a subset of organisational culture, research draws a crucial link between the perception of safety performance and actual safety performance. Teams with managers who demonstrate a commitment to safety and whose workers have positive workplace safety perceptions exhibit better safety performance.
In addition to workers’ perceptions, job satisfaction, and worker participation in safety have been shown to have a significant impact on safety culture and thus, safety performance. Engaging workers in objectives that shape a company’s safety culture can add to the safety culture consciousness and result in a better overall safety performance.
Using the Ringo platform, Kyle and the Saracen team now understand the missing element to shape their preferred safety culture, which will positively impact their safety performance.
The solution
Ringo used real-time data and the science of social psychology and culture to help Saracen shape their safety culture and align it with business and safety goals.
Using the Ringo platform, Saracen collected opinions of a statistically representative sample size of the target population, utilising Ringo’s unique method to mine the ‘gut feel’ of 84 workers. This process delivered a data set of triangulated quantitative and qualitative insights, from a baseline survey of individuals and focus groups.
Our tool provides a more collaborative approach to surveying, which aligns safety leaders with front line workers and breaks down silos, which can negatively impact safety culture and performance.
Through this approach, Saracen gathered information and took action on the recommended strategies without overwhelming their workers.
Insights and suggested actions
Following the baseline survey, Ringo analyses the insights gained and suggest strategies and tactics to shape safety culture. Using our KPI module to plot strategies and tactics that align with their safety objectives, Saracen created accountability. It then took actions to move their safety culture forward to their preferred shape. Kyle assigned the tactics to the relevant team members who are responsible for executing actions. By including this tool within the platform, clients can ensure accountability and manage efforts in a meaningful way.
Socratic learning materials
At Ringo, we provide micro-learning programs within the Ringo Academy that employ the Socratic learning method to stimulate critical thinking around safety culture.
The Socratic method is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions. By engaging in group discussion before reading our learning content, workers can draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions and identify potential learnings from work colleagues. Throughout the micro-learning content, there are individual reflection points on the key themes. On completion of the content, there is further group discussion on principles covered. By including these personal reflections and group discussion points, workers can apply the learning content pertinent to their company and discuss how they can be adopted or adapted.
Ringo provided micro-learning material to Saracen workers on crucial focus areas relating to the suggested strategies and their safety culture objectives. Our process empowers safety leaders with relevant learning materials to maximise the impact of the insights gained and contribute to their continuous learning. Ringo Academy is included at no extra cost, as we believe engaging leaders and workers with relevant, up-to-date learning materials is a valuable aspect of shaping your safety culture.
The future of safety culture
Under Kyle’s leadership, Saracen has kick-started the process of understanding and shaping their safety culture, in ways that they haven’t been able to previously. The initial pilot program and baseline survey is the basis for this case study. The baseline provided Saracen with strategies and tactics, actionable KPIs and relevant learning materials to upskill and develop leaders and workers. The team engaged actively with the survey (91% completion rate) and valued the simplicity, assured anonymity and clearly defined actions to come from the process.
From here, Kyle and the team continue their safety culture journey in the Ringo platform. With regular pulse surveys, Kyle will continue to gather real-time insights into the team’s opinions and work with Ringo to keep shaping the safety culture of Saracen. As they continue to uncover the missing element in their safety performance, Saracen will be able to move forward with the confidence that their efforts focused in the right areas.
Contact us
Email: info@ringoapp.com.au
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