To: All Freeport-McMoRan Employees
From: Steve Higgins, Chief Administrative Officer
Date: February 15, 2024
Our focus this year is to achieve safety and production targets by being the best at the basics. Recognizing employee safety and development go hand in hand, I am pleased to announce we are integrating the Health and Safety and Technical Training departments, resulting in the following organizational changes:
Stacey Koon will become Vice President-Safety, Health and Technical Training and will oversee the combined functions. She will continue to report to me.
Chad Fretz, General Manager-Responsible Production Frameworks, will become General Manager-Technical Training. In this new role, Chad will lead the Technical Training team in developing and implementing a sustainable technical learning framework. He will work in partnership with Human Resources to help ensure seamless integration with workforce development strategies.
Key to success will include close collaboration with the sites to develop a technical training program that meets their needs, leveraging technology to accelerate learning, providing the appropriate balance of classroom / field training, and ultimately integrating learning into the daily work. Chad will report to Stacey.
Turk Terrill, Manager-Technical Training, will support development and implementation of the technical training business plan and strategy. He will continue to report to Josh Olmsted, President and Chief Operating Officer-Americas.
Carl Mitchell, Manager-Technical Training, will retire at the end of February after more than 22 years with the company. We thank him for his numerous contributions to the organization.
More than a year ago, we started a process to reboot our leadership and technical training programs. We launched a new learning management system to support employee professional / leadership development and have spent considerable time evaluating our technical training.
By combining these departments, we will leverage current expertise and strengths to create a holistic training program with the right balance of leadership and technical skills. This will better equip our employees with the tools they need to be successful in their roles and most importantly, to work safely to meet our common goals.
We look forward to the opportunities this combination will bring, knowing our ability to meet our Safe Production plans depends on a highly skilled and effective workforce.
Please join me in wishing the entire team continued success and offering your full support.