Safety and Health

Summary

The Gold Fields Board, particularly its Safety, Health and Sustainable Development (SHSD) Committee, is firmly committed to our safety value and challenges management regularly to improve our safety and health performance, including by staying up to date with leading thinking and approaches to continually improve our performance.

Our Group Safety Strategy was updated and approved by the Board in 2019. Gold Fields strives for zero harm to our workforce. Several core beliefs are enshrined in our approach to the management of safety, including:

• Leadership is responsible and accountable for health and safety performance
• Living our values is fundamental to our safety and health performance
• All employees should return home safe and healthy every day
• Prevention is better than cure and therefore risk management is a key component of all systems
• All injuries and incidents are preventable and rely on good leadership, practical systems and positive employee behaviours
• The management of safety should be integrated seamlessly into all activities
• The right to say "no".

Given these beliefs, the key philosophies prevalent in our approach to safety are centred on:

• Safety performance forms a fundamental component of performance management and talent development through the monitoring of appropriate indicators
• The delivery of the required performance is not only systematic but requires developing leadership and a culture that enables the performance
• Risk assessment and the deployment of appropriate controls is a fundamental approach to the elimination of incidents and is therefore required to be a core competency throughout the workforce
• The application of the hierarchy of controls is particularly relevant to our business and provides the foundation for delivering a hazard- and impact-free workplace
• The elimination of incidents is a process of continual learning and drives continual improvement of our systems, practices and process
• Employees are encouraged to report injuries, incidents and hazards to support the process of continual improvement
• Absolute attention should be applied to the verification and maintenance of critical controls
• There is no tension between safety and production and our workforce must be empowered to "Stop, Think, Fix, Verify and Continue".

Our overriding strategic goal is focussed on eliminating material unwanted events, fatalities, serious potential incidents, health risk exposures and those injuries and illnesses that are serious enough to be life-changing. Where we have achieved the elimination of the abovementioned injuries and events, our focus remains on maintaining this result.

In addition, we apply the appropriate level of resources to a lower order priority in achieving continual improvement in the elimination injuries of lower significance (restricted work, medically treated and minor injuries) at our operations. To achieve the goal, the key strategic objectives are as follows:

• Develop a culture of safety leadership throughout the organisation and firmly embed safety management as a line management responsibility
• Provide appropriate mechanisms to engage our workforce on safety and health and equip them with the necessary skills to achieve safe outcomes consistently
• Ensure the deployment of fit for purpose management systems that are aligned to a critical control management approach and are certified to the ISO 45001 standard.

In 2018, Group targets were agreed:

• Zero fatalities
• Zero serious injuries ¹

We have not yet achieved these targets but remain committed to achieving them. Details of our annual safety performance may be found in our Integrated Annual Reports and Sustainability Performance Tables. Our safety and health KPIs are rigorously audited through a process that entails (details are provided in our Integrated Annual Report):

• Review and sign-off by discipline heads at operational, regional and corporate levels;
• Audit of data and controls by Group Internal Audit; and
• Independent, external audit of data and controls by independent expert auditors. The audit form is rotated regularly, approximately every five years, to ensure that independence is maintained.

We incentivise good safety performance and behaviour through Group and individual performance incentive programmes using leading and lagging indicators. Details are provided in our Remuneration Report.

Impact

Safety has been a focal point for the mining industry for many years. The industry has been challenged with ongoing fatal events and as a result, the focus in the early years of safety management was largely on fatality prevention. Injuries are classified according to their severity. In contrast to the Fatal Injury Frequency Rate (FIFR), Gold Fields’ Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR) has shown strong improvement since 2013, reducing by 60% over ten years., though it has been flat in recent years. Our focus has been not only on reducing the number of incidents but also their severity, i.e. their impact on our people, and in this area we have had some success, reducing the Lost Time Injury Duration Rate by 50%, from a peak of 67 days lost per injury in 2016 to 32 in 2022.

¹ A Serious Injury incurs 14 or more days lost and results in:

• A fracture of any bone (excluding hairline fractures and fractures of fingers, toes or nose);
• Internal haemorrhage;
• Head trauma (including concussion, loss of consciousness) requiring hospitalisation;
• Loss of all or part of a limb (excluding bone dressing to facilitate medical treatment of injured fingers and toes);
• Permanent loss of function and/or permanent disability such as hearing loss or damage to lung function;
• Permanent disfigurement where the injury has resulted in the appearance of a person being deeply and persistently harmed medically;
• Loss of foetus.

From 2020 to 2022, Covid-19 was a focus of our health programmes. Over the three years, 8,700 people tested positive, with 20 colleagues (employees and contractors) succumbing to the disease. More than 330,000 tests were administered. Almost the entire workforce was vaccinated, with our workforce in Australia, Chile and Peru receiving at least one booster. Significant assistance was provided to local communities faced with reduced employment opportunities and strict lockdowns in many cases. Local governments were also assisted with practical support and medical expertise.

Gold Fields’ workforce may be exposed to a range of occupational health and wellness risks associated with, among others, Silicosis, Tuberculosis (TB), Noise-Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) and Diesel Particulate Matter (DPM). The extent of the exposure risks differs from mine to mine. We comply with all occupational health regulations and, in countries where regulations have not yet been promulgated, we endeavour to follow industry best-practice standards. We are further guided by our goal of zero harm and consider the protection of employee health and wellness a fundamental human right. Health programmes remain a key focus area at South Deep, also because of the prevalence of many chronic diseases in South Africa. We developed a strategic framework for occupational health during 2020, which is supported by Group guidelines that are being rolled out across our operations.

Gold Fields’ Policies and Commitment

Our Occupational Health and Safety Policy Statement was updated in 2021 and forms an integral part of our Sustainable Development framework and commits us to the following objectives:

• eliminating fatal and serious injuries in our workforce;
• providing a workplace that is conducive to the health, safety and wellbeing of our workforce;
• continually improving our occupational health and safety management system and performance through the provision of appropriate leadership, systems, resources, training, support, personal protective equipment and the application of good practices, scientific knowledge and technology;
• creating a caring and trusting culture, with regular engagements at all levels of the organisation, where front-line leaders lead by example and everyone is confident to speak up about health and safety;
• active identification, assessment and control of occupational health and safety risks;
• complying with applicable legal requirements and other rules, codes and standards to which we subscribe, including ISO 45001;
• continually assessing our health and safety systems and developing internal standards and protocols where gaps are identified;
• ensuring that employees, contractors and other stakeholders have the relevant skills to perform work-related tasks in a safe manner and that they are aware of their individual occupational health and safety obligations and rights;
• applying an open, transparent, positive and constructive approach in health and safety related interactions with all stakeholders, including our host communities;
• benchmarking our health and safety performance, taking account of evolving stakeholder expectations to gauge our rate of progress;
• making this policy and its revisions, objectives and targets available to employees, contractors and other stakeholders;
• setting objectives in line with our commitment to this policy; and
• promoting consultation and participation on Occupational Health and Safety matters.

The policy statement clearly articulates the responsibility for achieving the objectives as resting with all employees.

The following internal guidelines support our work in this area (they are not in the public domain):

• Group Health and Safety Reporting Guideline
• Group Injury Classification Checklist
• Group Occupational Health Guideline
• Safety Newsflash Template

As a member of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), we engage actively with our peers on safety and health in the organisation’s committees and working groups. We are required to implement and publicly report and assure our performance against its Mining Principles and Performance Expectations, particularly:

5. Pursue continual improvement in physical and psychological health and safety performance with the ultimate goal of zero harm.

1. Implement practices aimed at continually improving workplace physical and psychological health and safety, and monitor performance for the elimination of workplace fatalities, serious injuries, psychosocial hazards and prevention of occupational diseases, based upon a recognised international standard or management system.
2. Provide workers with training in accordance with their responsibilities for physical and psychological health and safety and implement health surveillance and risk-based monitoring programmes based on occupational exposures.

We participate in ICMM’s programme on Innovation for Cleaner, Safer Vehicles (ICSV) with our peers and OEMs. We apply ICMM’s guidance on:

Fatality Prevention

Health and Safety Critical Control Management: Good Practice Guide

Critical Control Management: Implementation guide

Health and Safety Performance Indicators: Guidance

Overview of Leading Indicators for Occupational Health and Safety in Mining

Good Practice in Emergency Preparedness and Response

As a member of the World Gold Council, we are required to implement and publicly report and assure our performance against its Responsible Gold Mining Principles, particularly:

4. We will protect and promote the safety and occupational health of our workforce (employees and contractors) above all other priorities and will empower them to speak up if they encounter unsafe working conditions

1. We will be proactive in preventing fatalities and injuries to our workforce. Regular safety training will be conducted and personal protective equipment will be supplied at no cost to our workforce. Our objective is zero harm.
2. We will implement safety and health management systems based on internationally recognised good practice and focused on continuous improvement of our performance. We will engage regularly on these issues with our workforce and their representatives.
3. We will maintain high standards of occupational health and hygiene and implement risk-based monitoring of the health of our workforce based on occupational exposures. We will promote the physical and mental wellbeing of our workforce.
4. We will identify and eliminate or minimise significant risks to the health and safety of local people as a result of our activities and those of our contractors. We will develop, maintain and test emergency response plans based on national regulations and international best practice guidelines, ensuring the involvement of potentially affected stakeholders.

We interact with peers on safety and health in the WGC ESG Taskforce. National industry associations also address safety and health vigorously and we participate actively in these forums and in stakeholder-led working groups.

Management Actions

The actions supporting our strategic objectives have been categorised into safety leadership, safe behaviour and safety systems. Gold Fields’ zero harm Safety Strategy focuses on three key, mutually supportive and comprehensive programmes:

• Courageous Safety Leadership (CSL), is about motivating employees to display leadership
• The Vital Behaviours programme seeks to influence employees to make the right choices
• The Critical Control Management (CCM) approach within our safety systems

The CSL programme equips our workforce with practical tools to become safety leaders, while also fostering an environment in which individuals feel empowered to speak out about unsafe behaviours. Improvements to our leading indicators are a positive sign of potential improvement. Over 5,800 employees attended CSL training in 2021 – exceeding our target of 4,500 people – despite continued Covid-19 restrictions. To date, over 16,000 people have been trained.

CSL and other programmes do not merely inform and train employees, they also provide a forum to engage employees and contractors to understand what is important to them and to identify opportunities for improvement. This is essential for ensuring that our safety programmes are fit for purpose and to continue improving performance.

The Vital Behaviours programme in Australia, which is being rolled out to our other regions, is a bottom-up behavioural programme that supports improvement in health and safety outcomes via safe production. It empowers workers to identify and resolve workplace health and safety issues and hazards, supported and enabled via management commitment. It includes "Opinion Leaders" who represent workers and actively influence adoption and application of Vital Behaviours. CCM is a key tool used by Gold Fields to prevent incidents that have the potential to severely injure our people. We follow the approach outlined by the ICMM, and have learnt much from – and, we believe, contributed to – the efforts of our peers in the ICMM. CCM is a practical method of improving managerial control over rare but potentially catastrophic events – called material unwanted events (MUEs) – by focusing on critical controls. The first step is to identify controls for each MUE, in particular those controls that will prevent the event from occurring or mitigate the consequences. The absence or failure of a critical control will significantly increase the risk of an MUE occurring, despite the existence of other controls. We provide a level of external assurance over the critical controls in place for specific MUEs.

As a very deep mine, our South Deep operation has historically recorded more fatal and serious injuries than out other mines. To eliminate serious injuries and fatalities, South Deep has evolved its Safety Strategy, which builds on the Group strategy and rests on three human dimensions: motivation, mindset and method. It also places greater emphasis on people – especially the factors that influence decisions and behaviours. Each person at Gold Fields is expected to take personal accountability for safety based on the belief that all incidents are preventable. While technical solutions, strategies, rules and regulations contribute towards a safe workplace, these are rarely enough without also having a strong safety culture. South Deep did not record any fatalities in 2022 and halved the number of serious injuries from 4 in 2021 to 2 in 2022.

All Gold Fields managed sites have an occupational health and safety management system that is certified to ISO 45001. The certified management system includes the following components:

• Each site maintains, with annual reviews of completeness and compliance, a legal register
• Hazard and incident management processes. Incident management software is used to record investigations and manage corrective actions, including improvements to systems to prevent recurrence
• Training records
• Incidents and near misses are discussed by site and regional leadership teams and shared across the group.

Each site provides workers with access to medical and health services including:

• Health monitoring of workers in higher risk occupations, including diesel particulate matter (DPM), respirable silica dust, noise and radon gas
• Wellness support, including, as appropriate, HIV counselling and testing
• Each site maintains confidential medical records for workers compensation.

Each site communicates with its workforce on occupational health and safety through:

• Pre-shift meetings, toolbox (safety) meetings, health and safety committee meetings, incident investigations, risk assessments and audits
• Health and safety representatives and Health and Safety Committees comprising management and the workforce Health and safety representatives and Health and Safety Committees comprising management and the workforce

All sites provide occupational health and safety training, based on a training needs analysis, in work time, including:

• General and site specific inductions, hazard identification and risk assessment training, incident reporting and investigation
• Job-related skills training in specific job procedures and production processes
• Critical hazard (high risk) activities, e.g. confined space, isolation, working at height
• Licence and authority training, e.g. isolation officer, electrician, crane operator
• Statutory positions, e.g. registered manager, health and safety representative, explosives.

Business partners working on Gold Fields sites are required to demonstrate compliance to Gold Fields policies and standards. The health and safety systems of all major service suppliers are evaluated in the tendering process to ensure consistency with Gold Fields’ health and safety requirements and values and are audited.

We have established regional environmental, health and safety (EHS) scorecards to improve performance at an operational level. These scorecards include leading and lagging key performance indicators (KPIs), along with Group-wide and regional KPIs.