SUSTAINABILITY 
Psychosocial harm
Supporting our safety transformation and preventing psychosocial harm
Our commitment to guaranteeing everyone goes home safe and well every day extends beyond physical injury to people's psychological health and emotional wellbeing. We seek to create a safe workplace where everyone feels respected, valued and empowered to speak up, and we do not tolerate any form of harassment, bullying, discrimination or harmful behaviour.
Our cultural transformation journey reflects a deep commitment to creating a workplace defined by care, respect, inclusivity, connectedness and accountability. We aspire to become a diverse and inclusive team, proudly embodying the Gold Fields values and culture. Together, we want to grow our capabilities and potential to deliver meaningful impact. This journey is focused on building leadership capability; establishing effective structures, routines and practices; ensuring our people are equipped with the appropriate skills and capabilities; and building systems, standards and processes that support collaboration and efficiency.
In 2024, our efforts centred on integrating and refining culture priorities to ensure our commitments are implemented systematically. The insights gained from the independent culture review conducted by EB&Co, along with the findings from the comprehensive independent safety review undertaken in 2024, serve as the foundation for our ongoing efforts to strengthen and evolve our culture.
We continue implementing EB&Co's recommendations, with progress built into leadership key performance indicators (KPIs) and overseen by the SET Committee. Our progress is further monitored by annual culture check-ins.
Key milestones during the year include establishing the Respectful Workplace Advisory Council to drive the implementation of recommendations from the review and provide critical guidance on advancing our culture commitments, as well as developing a tailored Respectful Workplace toolkit to assist leaders at all levels to have challenging and important conversations that underpin the respectful, caring and inclusive workplace.
For more information on how we leverage culture for improved delivery, refer to our Report to Stakeholders.
In February 2025, we published an 18-month review of the progress Gold Fields made in implementing EB&Co's recommendations. The focus was on cultural transformation, leadership accountability and meaningful structural changes that reinforce our commitment to a safer and more respectful workplace.
With most EB&Co recommendations well advanced – but some yet to meaningfully impact our people's lived experience – we are shifting focus to embedding the recommendations into our broader culture and safety workstreams. While the 21 recommendations have driven significant change, from 2025, our Respectful Workplace efforts will focus on key areas that deliver a greater impact on employees' daily experiences.
The dashboard below tracks our progress.
| Inclusive and committed leadership | Prevention and early intervention | Dignity and human rights at work | Person-centred responses | Business partners included | Monitoring, transparency and accountability |
|
Gold Fields’ Board, CEO and Executive Committee should take
responsibility for cultural change
Gold Fields should invest in specialist diversity, equity, inclusion and
belonging expertise and capability at a senior level across regions
The Board, CEO and Executive Committee should provide the
workforce with a signed statement that commits to a safe, respectful
and inclusive workplace
The Executive Committee should cascade the need for personal
leadership action plans to all levels of management across the
Group
Leaders at all levels should be held accountable for the culture,
health and wellbeing of their teams and initiate regular dialogue
about the case for change
Leaders should be provided with the capability and practical skills
to address harmful behaviour
Recruitment and promotion practices should ensure people
appointed to leadership roles have the capacity to deal with harmful
behaviours in the workplace
The CEO and Executive Committee should select up to 20 people
from across the Group to assist with the culture change process |
Address hazards and
risks associated with
harmful behaviour as
safety risks
Provide global specialist
education across the
Company on the case for
change
Review training practices
at all locations,
recognising that trainers
are key to influencing
new and existing
employees in relation to
workplace culture
Review and revise all
policy frameworks to
create a simplified global
framework for all harmful
behaviours
|
Audit all facilities and PPE
to ensure safety,
inclusion, respect and
dignity for all employees
Regularly monitor, review
and address structural
barriers affecting people
seeking appointment or
promotion
|
Establish a discrete unit
for disclosing and
reporting incidences of
harmful behaviour
All investigations into
harmful behaviour should
be undertaken with a
trauma-informed
approach and be
confidential, transparent
and fair
|
Senior leaders should
engage with business
partners and contractors
to obtain a deeper
understanding of their
lived experience of
working at Gold Fields
Where relevant,
incorporate in contracting
arrangements with
business partners access
to all harmful behaviour
data involving Gold Fields
employees
|
Readminister the survey
from the EB&Co review
every two to three years
through an independent
reviewer
Track and report progress
to the Board and
Executive Committee on
a quarterly basis
Expand its ESG metrics
beyond gender diversity
to incorporate other
diversity metrics and
measures of inclusion,
psychological safety and
culture
|
Completed
|
On track |
Creating a diverse and inclusive workforce
At Gold Fields, we understand that harnessing diverse perspectives, experiences and attributes is a key driver of business performance. We believe a diverse and inclusive workforce enables us to deliver better outcomes and are working to create an organisation that reflects the demographics of the countries and communities in which we operate. This goal can only be realised by building a workplace culture that holds safety, wellbeing, inclusivity and respect at its core.
We made significant progress in advancing these priorities. This includes developing a clear roadmap, guided by insights and recommendations from the Respectful Workplace Advisory Council, to ensure we work in an environment where everyone contributes to Gold Fields' purpose.
Progress against our diversity and inclusion focus areas is measured through lead indicators like succession planning, risk of employee departures and other key factors that drive our workforce composition. At the end of December 2024, 25%RA of Gold Fields' employees were women, same as in 2023. The percentage of women in core mining roles rose to 56% (2023: 54%), while the percentage of women in leadership improved from 27% in 2023 to 28% in 2024. While these statistics show room for improvement, it is pleasing to see the steady increase in female representation over time: in 2016, only 16% of our workforce were women; 15% at management level and 8% in core mining roles.
The basic salary ratio for women to men was 0.95 in 2024 (2023: 0.94), reflecting our focused recruitment, retention and development of women, as well as salary adjustments where necessary.
In South Africa, legislation requires strong representation by HDPs in the workplace. South Deep is making good progress in this regard, with 80% of the workforce HDPs and 66% of senior management. Women make up 28% of South Deep's workforce, the highest level in the Group. South Deep launched a Women's Advisory Council in Q4 2024, comprising a cross-section of female employee representatives across all levels. The council will support the Employment Equity Committee to integrate our diversity aspirations and embed the Group's broader culture transformation drive.
Refining our organisational structure
On 1 July 2024, we implemented our redesigned organisational structure and transitioned from a three-layered (Group, regions, operations) structure to a two-layered (Group, operations), function-led organisational structure, which supports safe and reliable portfolio performance. The new organisational structure also provides more agility, along with stronger functional leadership, guidance and support to the operations, as our portfolio evolves to enable the delivery of our strategy. We believe the new organisational structure will drive standardised ways of working and provide agility and growth opportunities that can leverage the experience of our people across the Group. Our operations will be empowered to focus on their core mandate of safe, reliable, cost-effective production driven by a single, united global team that works collaboratively towards shared goals.
Talent and leadership development
The changes to our organisational structure served as a strategic opportunity to review and optimise existing talent, ensuring that the right individuals and new capabilities are aligned with future structural needs. We conducted a comprehensive talent review of our senior leaders to equip the Group for sustained growth and success. We also reviewed how we measure, recognise and reward our people for their performance to drive our desired business outcomes and the culture we seek to foster.
Under the new organisational structure, talent is managed by discipline based on role-specific requirements that have now been standardised across the Group. This defines career pathways by discipline and presents cross-disciplinary opportunities, and will be implemented in 2025. A key focus area will be on building line manager capability to manage performance and talent.
We believe that our training and development programmes continue to attract new talent and develop the skills required by an evolving mining landscape, including increasingly mechanised, modernised and automated mines. In 2024, we invested US$1,930 per employee in training (2023: US$1,400).
Attracting and retaining our talent remains a focus area as we continue to build our brand and employee benefits. Critical role turnover for the Group was 7% in 2024, against a target of 5%, but an improvement on the previous years. Our Western Australian operations in particular had high turnover levels of 13% amid retention challenges in a fiercely competitive skills market. Factors influencing the workforce in Australia include skills shortages in crucial job categories and the mobile nature of the fly-in, fly-out workforce.
We recognise the important role of leadership and continued to implement our leadership development programme for senior managers, middle managers and graduates during the year, and are working towards a new supervisory development programme to enhance our overall leadership effectiveness in 2025. In doing this, we can equip our leaders with the capabilities needed to manage people, processes and systems to realise our 2035 aspirations safely and predictably.
Integrating Windfall employees into the Group
In May 2023, we partnered with Osisko Mining to develop and mine the underground Windfall project in Québec, Canada through a 50/50 JV. This year, we completed a transaction to acquire Osisko Mining to give Gold Fields 100% ownership of the Windfall project and the extensive surrounding exploration camps. The transaction marked an important step in our journey to continue improving the quality of our portfolio. While the creation of the JV enabled the Gold Fields and Osisko Mining teams to familiarise themselves and learn to work together, the focus since the acquisition has been on fully integrating the Windfall team into Gold Fields. This has been supported by the recent organisational structure changes, which connected our Windfall team members to their broader functional colleagues.
Organised labour
We continue to uphold our employees' rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, and ensure our contractors also abide by these standards.
Trade union membership among our employees is as follows:
In accordance with legislative requirements, we do not collect data around union representation for our employees or contractors in Australia. We have enterprise agreements in place with most of our employees, effective until June 2026. Our senior employees have individual employment contracts.
In February 2024, South Deep concluded a two-year extension to its three-year wage agreement with organised labour. The mine has a stable labour relations environment with its representative trade unions, particularly the National Union of Mineworkers, of which about 75% of the workforce are members.
Our employees in Ghana are currently not unionised and union membership among the largely contracted workforce is close to half.
In Chile, the mining industry has the highest level of unionisation. At Salares Norte, a new labour agreement was signed in July 2023, which updated the conditions and benefits at the site until July 2025.
Our Peruvian operations were impacted by increased trade union activities – often resulting from restructuring – and new labour laws. At Cerro Corona, we were still operating under our three-year labour agreement concluded in October 2022.
