SUSTAINABILITY 
Safety
Protecting the health, safety and wellbeing of our people remains our number one value and is core to everything we do. Gold Fields is committed to creating safe and respectful workplaces and guaranteeing that everyone who works at Gold Fields goes home safe and well every day.
We believe that a fatality and serious injury-free business is possible, and we recognise that our responsibility extends beyond protecting the physical safety and occupational health of our people: we must ensure their psychosocial wellbeing as well.
Group safety performance (employees and contractors)
| Total workforce | Employees | Contractors | Proportion of nationals1 |
|||
| 2024 | 2024 | 2023 | 2024 | 2023 | 2024 | |
| Australia | 4,340 | 1,929 | 1,879 | 2,411 | 1,895 | 77% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| South Africa | 5,266 | 2,613 | 2,582 | 2,653 | 2,574 | 89%2 |
| Ghana | 7,112 | 772 | 823 | 6,340 | 5,781 | 100% |
| Canada3 | 582 | 203 | — | 379 | — | — |
| Chile | 3,336 | 502 | 471 | 2,834 | 3,300 | 97% |
| Peru | 2,116 | 404 | 418 | 1,712 | 1,678 | 100% |
| Corporate | 138 | 137 | 124 | 1 | 1 | 58% |
| Total | 22,890 | 6,560 | 6,297 | 16,330 | 15,229 | 87% |
| 1 | Employees only |
| 2 | Most of the remaining employees are Southern African Development Community nationals |
| 3 | Apart from the total workforce, employees and contractors number for the Windfall project, these employees and contractors are excluded from all other human resource and host community indicators |
Gold Fields has a total workforce of 22,890 people across six countries – this includes our 16,330
contractors, who are critical to our success. Our long-term focus on host community employment continues to
influence our workforce profile: host community members comprise 52%RA of our workforce (2023: 51%). This
aligns with our strategy of creating value for the communities in the countries where we operate.
Key human resources metrics (end-December)
| Category | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 |
| Total workforce | 22,890 | 21,526 | 23,084 | 22,110 | 18,412 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum wage ratio1 | 2.00 | 2.10 | 2.41 | 1.78 | 1.71 |
| Female employees (%) | 25RA | 25 | 23 | 22 | 20 |
| Ratio of basic salary women to men | 0.95 | 0.94 | 0.97 | 0.70 | 0.69 |
| Employee wages and benefits (US$m)2 | 498 | 453 | 468 | 463 | 412 |
| Average training spend per employee (US$) | 1,930 | 1,400 | 1,411 | 1,397 | 1,211 |
| Employee turnover (%) | 14 | 13 | 16 | 12 | 11 |
| 1 | Entry-level employee wages compared with local minimum wage. This ratio excludes Ghana, as the mines only employ management-level employees with contractor mining in use at both of our mines |
| 2 | This excludes benefits |
We aim to guarantee that our people go home safe and well every day. Tragically, we fell short of this commitment in 2024, and it is with profound sadness that we reported two fatalities at our operations during the year. On 2 January 2024, a South Deep employee, Khathutshelo Khaukanani, was fatally injured in an underground incident involving trackless mining equipment. A second fatal incident occurred in Australia on 23 April 2024, when Eli Kelly, who was employed by one of the mine’s business partners, was fatally injured in a mobile equipment-related incident at a construction site on St Ives.
A tragic, non-operational incident also occurred off-site on a public road on 21 October 2024, where a subcontractor was fatally injured while transporting a raise bore rig from Agnew. We recorded threeRA serious injuries this year, compared to six in 2023.
We cannot claim to be a safe business until we sustainably eliminate serious injuries and fatalities across the Group. We have not yet achieved this, but we recognise the continual improvement in reducing all injuries and, in particular, reducing the number of serious injuries by over 80% since 2018.
The severity of lost time injuries (LTIs), as measured by days of work lost per millions hours, reduced to 19 days in 2024 (2023: 28 days), while the LTI duration rate declined to 29 days (2023: 45 days). Our total injury exposure, as measured by the total recordable injury frequency rate (TRIFR), deteriorated from 2.36 in 2023 to 2.62RA recordable injuries per million hours worked in 2024. The number of near misses reported during 2024 was 1,915RA (2023: 2,325).
We continue to track a set of leading and lagging indicators across all operations and projects to monitor the quality of our safety leadership, risk mitigation and response to address deviation. We also strengthened our approach to learning-from-incidents by building capacity for higher-quality incident investigations through multi-disciplinary teams. These lessons are also shared with our senior leaders.
In addition to addressing the culture and human behaviours that lead to unsafe practices, we continued to focus on engineering and technical solutions, including advanced AI, which make our operations safer and remove people from the risk exposure. This includes managing geotechnical risks, both at our underground and open-pit operations, collision avoidance technologies and utilising teleremote operations where possible.
Group safety performance (employees and contractors)
| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | |
| Fatalities | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serious injuries1 | 3RA | 6 | 5 | 9 | 6 |
| LTIs2 | 29 | 27 | 31 | 30 | 32 |
| Total lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) | 0.66RA | 0.62 | 0.60 | 0.62 | 0.72 |
| Employee LTIFR | 0.78 | 1.11 | 0.64 | 0.67 | 0.91 |
| Contractor LTIFR | 0.61 | 0.44 | 0.58 | 0.59 | 0.62 |
| Total TRIFR3 | 2.62RA | 2.36 | 2.04 | 2.16 | 2.40 |
| Employee TRIFR | 3.29 | 3.68 | 2.04 | 2.35 | 2.91 |
| Contractor TRIFR | 2.39 | 4.37 | 2.04 | 2.08 | 2.13 |
| Severity rate4 | 19 | 28 | 19 | 19 | 32 |
| 1 | Since 2019, we have applied Gold Fields’ definition to classify serious injuries, whereby a serious injury incurs 14 days or more of work lost and results in one of a range of injuries detailed at www.goldfields.com/safety.php |
| 2 | LTI is a work-related injury resulting in an employee or contractor being unable to attend work and perform any of their duties for one or more days after the injury |
| 3 | TRIFR = (fatalities + LTIs + restricted work injuries + medically treated injuries) x 1,000,000/number of hours worked |
| 4 | Severity rate = days lost to LTIs/hours worked x 1,000,000 |
In February 2024, we initiated an independent safety diagnostic of our Group’s safety leadership, processes, systems and practices to identify opportunities to accelerate our safety journey. The review by dss+ found many good practices within the Group, including key management systems and governance structures with safety integrated into most management processes. We have started to leverage these practices across our global operations. There are, however, also areas where the diagnostic emphasised areas of improvement, which related particularly to the impact of leadership, achieving greater levels of standardisation across all operations and optimising our approach to risk management.
The insights and expertise gained from our employees and business partners through the safety review served as the foundation of the safety improvement plan, which aims to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries through a multi-year, Group-wide safety programme. The plan is based on four focus areas, covering: leadership and culture; resilient risk reduction; building capability; and business partner management.
Leadership and culture
We plan to develop leaders and ensure our people truly believe in our ambition to eliminate all serious incidents, injuries and fatalities. We intend to work with leaders across all levels to demonstrate visible safety leadership and foster an environment where everyone feels trusted, valued and heard. For several years, our safety engagements served as a critical leading indicator. Typically, these range from leadership engagements to critical control verifications and peer-to-peer interactions on unsafe conditions. We are resetting the foundation for our safety engagements by deliberately focusing on Visible Felt Leadership, building capability with our leaders, providing them with the right tools to hold quality conversations, set expectations for the management of risks and enabling a culture of safe and transparent reporting.
Building on lessons from previous work, our approach to safety leadership has evolved to acknowledge that good leadership does not depend on the subject matter, but rather on the capacity of leaders being developed. We are therefore integrating our safety leadership requirements into our broader leadership development efforts.
In 2019, Gold Fields adopted a Courageous Safety Leadership programme across all operations to support our objective of eliminating serious injuries and fatalities. The programme intends to equip every person working at Gold Fields to become a Courageous Safety Leader by identifying unsafe approaches to work, stopping them and assisting in implementing solutions designed to ensure safe outcomes. The programme continues to be facilitated by leaders within the business and is a requirement for all employees and contractors.
To date, over 34,000 people have attended the programme – 6,100 people in 2024, including senior leaders from our Board and Executive Committee.
Resilient risk reduction
We are revisiting our processes and systems to ensure we effectively reduce risks by simplifying systems, improving controls and holding each other accountable to eliminate serious injuries and fatalities. Our desired outcomes include the following:
We implemented a risk containment process at our operations to rapidly build our leaders’ capabilities to identify risks, as well as engage in constructive conversations in the field to address those risks identified. During the year, 281 leaders across five operations completed formal risk containment training, which was conducted by an independent expert, followed by coaching on effective field engagements. We will expand this process to all operations in 2025, which will form the foundation for ongoing leadership development.
Our Group Technical team provides strong technical expertise into the design of risk controls and assurance over our catastrophic and other safety risks, and support the piloting and testing of new and advanced technologies for further risk reduction.
The mining industry continues to face geotechnical challenges due to ageing of certain mines and a trend toward mining deeper pits and more complex, often deeper underground deposits. This leads to higher pit walls, more complex underground environments, increased exposure to geotechnical instability, and increased propensity for seismic damage and hydrological impacts.
The Group’s geotechnical team conducts annual reviews of all geotechnical incidents and incident types at our operations to identify trends and reduce the likelihood of incident recurrence. There were 43 incidents within our open pits in 2024, a marginal improvement from 2023, notwithstanding two new pits being mined and existing pits deepening during this period. We recorded 32 geotechnical incidents in our underground mines during the year (2023: 42). Dynamically driven ground support failure accounted for 37% of these, static falls-of-ground for 43%, and backfill issues the remainder.
Our portfolio consists of deep-level mines which are seismically active due to induced stresses approaching or exceeding the strength of the rock mass. South Deep had six damaging seismic incidents in 2024, while our underground mines in Western Australia – at Granny Smith, Agnew and St Ives – recorded five events.
We aim to use industry best practices in seismological monitoring and analysis, in addition to using dynamic ground support in these operations. We further mitigate this risk through geotechnical risk management practices like improved support and standards, backfilling and stabilising pillars and, to identify seismic activity early, we perform seismic analysis and have seismic monitoring systems in place.
At South Deep, pre-conditioning is undertaken in all destress areas to fracture the rock mass ahead of work being done. Geotechnical Review Boards help implement industry best practice geotechnical design; monitoring; mine design; extraction sequencing; and ground support implementation, specifically at Cerro Corona, South Deep and Agnew.
Advancements in technology continue to transform the mining industry, and safety is one of our key drivers to further modernise and mechanise activities in our mines.
The ICMM formed a partnership with the Earth Moving Equipment Safety Round Table Group to ensure safe and effective deployment of vehicle interaction and collision avoidance system (CAS) initiatives. Gold Fields opted to implement both operational and reactive controls to address vehicle interaction concerns, and is collaborating with technology suppliers to enhance system reliabilities.
As part of the operational controls, fatigue management systems are being deployed in open-pit operations. These systems are starting to improve the number of fatigue events reported, as well as operator discipline – particularly at our Ghanaian mines, which is also pioneering an ICMM-led vehicle interaction site programme.
For reactive controls, we are implementing CAS in both open-pit and underground operations. Gold Fields completed a Group Open-pit Minimum Standard, which requires that all mobile equipment entering open pits from 2026 must be fitted with an approved CAS system (level 8). Open-pit mines with a LOM beyond 2030 must upgrade this CAS functionality further to level 9 by December 2027. Underground level 9 CAS deployment at South Deep is set for completion during 2025, while the Australian mines will be piloting level 8 systems during 2025.
Work in this area includes installing more advanced detection sensors to prevent machine-tomachine or machine-to-person collisions by slowing down and then stopping the machine completely. In addition, cap lamp detectors will help prevent machine-to-person or machine-tomachine collisions by slowing down the machine and stopping it automatically.
The work on underground vehicles has been extended to ensure reduced diesel emissions through the introduction of low emission and zero emission vehicles. In finding these solutions, our teams work with our peers and equipment manufacturers via the ICMM’s Innovation for Cleaner Safer Vehicles initiative. Work is progressing, but to date pilot projects at our mines have produced mixed results.
Another critical safety initiative is identifying opportunities to remove people from active mining areas via teleremote loading, rock breaking and managing underground mining activities from the surface. At South Deep, teleremote longhole stope drilling capabilities were installed, while we use teleremote load haul dump surface operations across our Australian underground mines.
Building capability
Building capability within our Company is key to the sustainability of our performance and ensuring our people feel safe enough to report and mitigate risks. In doing this, we aim to deliver the following:
Our new organisational structure includes a strengthened Group safety and health function. The safety improvement plan implementation facilitates collaboration, alignment and delivery of practical processes and systems through cross operational and functional working groups. We also established external support to coach and mentor our safety professionals.
In building the foundation, our attention will shift toward frontline supervision, understanding the barriers to effective safety management and ensuring processes are implemented to eliminate these barriers.
Business partner management
Contractors constitute 73% of our total workforce and play a critical role in helping us run our business and achieving our safety aspirations. We started developing a comprehensive framework that aligns and integrates the operations of our business partners with our values and standards. By developing this framework, we hope to:
Foundational work for the workforce includes integrating business partner data into our database, streamlining processes and ensuring more effective oversight and engagement.
