We put safety first – this is our primary value – and we aim for Zero Harm. A safe workplace is essential to the success of our business, and no single diamond is worth a human life. Great importance is placed on safety issues in all areas of our operations, and we continuously focus on making the workplace accident-free. We actively cultivate a safety-oriented culture and strive to design, organise, conduct and equip our business to prevent safety incidents and to minimise the consequences of any incidents that do occur. Our goal is to make sure every employee, contractor, and visitor returns home from our operations healthy and injury free.
Our governance framework supports continual improvement in safety performance against the highest defined standards, and makes provision for appropriate assurances, reviews and certification programmes. These include the International Safety Management (ISM) certification for the company and its owned vessels, ISO 45001 certification, vessel statutory and class scheduled surveys, internal audits, and other industry third-party audits. Our occupational health and safety management system has been certified to the ISO 45001 standard since May 2021. ISO 45001 replaced OHSAS 18001 as the international standard for occupational health and safety management in March 2021.
Our safety risk strategy aligns with the Organisational Risk Management Process (ORMP) and the Fatal Risk Standards. Critical controls, including prevention, monitoring and response are developed for all site risks, with monitoring and verification implemented through our SAP project management system.
Our safety maturity journey
In 2017, we embarked on the pioneering brilliant safety approach Safety Maturity Journey (SMJ) initiative, an ongoing cross-cutting process which guides the enculturation of safety across the company. The SMJ was deemed as success in De Beers and Debmarine Namibia won the Albert Milton Safety Leadership Award in 2020 for the initiative.
Continual learning and development is a central tenet of the SMJ approach, and is key to successfully building a safety-oriented culture and enabling continual improvements in safety performance. Safety is a core focus of our learning and development programme, and through this programme, we implement various initiatives and activations to raise awareness, build knowledge, and develop skills that progress and enhance safety performance through the SMJ.
