(November 21, 2022), At a virtual town hall devoted solely to worker safety, Josh Olmsted charted the course the company will follow to return to the level of safe production that made Freeport-McMoRan a safety paragon of the industry.
That course, he noted, will come with the changes necessary to help ensure employees are kept safe on the job.
“The old definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results,” said Olmsted, President and Chief Operating Officer-Americas. “We can’t continue to do that. We need to make sure we’re stopping and doing things differently.
Olmsted’s pledge encapsulated the hour-long November 10 town hall where Olmsted was joined by Stacey Koon, Vice President, Corporate Health and Safety, and Steve Higgins, Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer.
Examination of the data
As Freeport aims to get its arms around the root causes of the uptick in safety incidents, Koon said the company has thoroughly evaluated the data contained in the incident reports and connected it with other company data sets to help take the most effective actions.
“What we are beginning to do is to identify correlations that we can truly action on confidently,” she said. Koon added that in the past, the team would rely on hunches and would take actions without much confidence. With better data that no longer is the case.
The correlations point to impacts caused by challenges in hiring, retention and training of employees through the pandemic years have had, with the three most vulnerable groups of employees being:
- Employees with three years or less of experience
- Employees of supervisors with three years or less of experience in their current role
- Employees working as trainees, laborers, and equipment and process operators (This group is three times more likely to be involved in a safety incident.)
The pandemic and its related economic complications dramatically altered the nature of the workforce, as the company has hired more than 6,000 employees since 2021. In addition, out of a total of 950 supervisors in North America, more than 400, or 42 percent, became new supervisors since January 2021.
Those factors led to the worst quarter of safety performance North American operations has had in almost a decade, Koon said.
“What’s even more concerning is the increase in the high-energy, high-impact events is disproportionate to the amount of incidents overall,” Koon said. “I don’t want to paint everybody with a broad brush. Just last month, the Miami Rod Mill surpassed 1,500 zero days, and when you walk through that business, you can see the pride in the employees’ faces about their safety success.”
That safety culture at the rod mill exemplifies the one Freeport has long been known for and will work to regain, Olmsted said.
“We can’t accept the level of performance we currently have, and more importantly, we can’t accept that we continue to hurt people,” Olmsted said. He went on to explain that working safely is a shared responsibility between management and frontline employees throughout the organization.
The way forward will lean heavily on skill development.
“We’re going to work really hard on training our people up, but it can’t only be training in the classroom,” Olmsted said. “There has to be a strong element of time in the field for that training and mentoring.”
Responsibility on all employees
Moving ahead the company also will lean heavily on all employees, regardless of their roles with the company, Higgins said.
“Safety is everyone’s responsibility, even to those with administrative and corporate roles that don’t directly affect safety, because indirectly, we do,” he said. “Indirectly, some of the work we do can be an extra burden to our maintenance and production folks, so we really need to think about everything we do and how it affects our ability to be safe.”
In response to a question about whether the use of personal cell phones on site may have contributed to the increasing incident rate, Olmsted maintained that the nature of the company’s commitment to improving safety won’t rule out any potential factor without scrutinizing it.
“I would classify that as something that could be an additional distraction, so one of the things we’ve been talking about all along is managing those distractions,” he said. “Whether it’s the phone or something I’m just thinking about, we’re all accountable to holding ourselves to the expectations we have.”