PT Freeport Indonesia (PTFI) is a leading mining company in Indonesia with a commitment to safe production. At the core of our operations are our SINCERE values – Safety, Integrity, Commitment, Respect and Excellence. The objective of SINCERE is to encourage these values throughout the organization as the fundamental pillars of our corporate identity.
Safety Starts with Me! truly reflects how PTFI and our employees see ourselves as an organization. PTFI has gone through great lengths to ensure the availability of resources to support the company’s safe production goals and create a conducive and safe work environment for our workforce. We believe by prioritizing safety, safe production will surely follow, directing the company’s vision to become the most efficient, safest and healthiest copper and gold producer in the industry.
At the heart of our operation is our most valuable assets, the workers. Our workers hail from various educational and cultural backgrounds. Our workforce diversity remains a strength that we must manage properly. We believe PTFI safety values have been fully integrated and implemented within our workforce and corporate culture. However, there remains some challenges.
The recurrence of behavior-related safety incidents pushed us to rethink our strategies in addressing safety. For instance, we still experience repeated similar incidents in the workplace, numerous employees continue to perceive safety as only management and supervisors’ responsibility; some employees are still reluctant to report unsafe conditions, unsafe behaviors and near-misses; communicating safety information/message is just a ‘tick of the box’; et cetera.
PTFI strives to develop and equip our workers to match the demands of their job assignment by providing the appropriate tools and Personal Protective Equipment required to execute the job safely. Worker’s competencies are obtained from classroom training as well as on-the-job practical training. Quality training and customization of training modules will bridge the gap of understanding between workers with different educational and cultural backgrounds. However, acknowledging that training, tools and PPE alone are not sufficient to address worker’s behavior, we opt for engineering controls as the most effective method in mitigating potential human errors in the workplace where elimination or substitution are not possible.
A key safety program at PTFI is Fatal Risk Management (FRM) as a Fatality Prevention effort. We believe it is possible and a must to send every worker home safely every day. It is essential for FRM’s success that every worker take accountability for his own safety and his co-worker's safety with closer supervision and management commitment being the backbone of FRM. Although FRM at PTFI is still in its infancy, we are seeing our worker’s behavior moving toward positive outcomes, especially concerning identification of hazards and assessing risks before carrying out a task. Periodically, we examine the effectiveness of controls and measure progress through inspections, observations and audit processes.
PTFI remains strongly committed to implementing continuous improvements of our safety culture to further embed our core values within the workforce and throughout the organization. PTFI strives to achieve target objectives for safe production and transition to a generative organization where there is active participation at all levels. We remain focused on executing our plans to provide short and long-term values of Safety, Integrity, Commitment, Respect and Excellence (SINCERE) to further advance PTFI as the most efficient, safest and healthiest copper and gold producer in the industry. Safety starts with me!
Author: Henky Rumbino
Back To List
