Improving safety in mining

Project Overview

A study of why unsafe acts happen on an open-pit mining operation, and a redesign of the way workers report them.

Mining operations carry some of the most complex safety challenges in industry. Despite rigorous protocols, unsafe behaviours and conditions persist, driven by habit, time pressure, and systemic barriers to reporting. We applied a human-centred approach with frontline workers to find the root causes and co-create the solutions.

Unsafe Conditions

Physical hazards in the environment: inadequate lighting, unstable structures, faulty equipment. Workers encounter them daily and often normalise them over time.

Unsafe Behaviours

Actions or inactions by workers that deviate from established safety procedures: skipping checks, bypassing equipment, and under-reporting near-miss incidents.

Challenges

1. Workers skip safety checks under time pressure, creating invisible compliance gaps.
2. Near-miss incidents are systematically under-reported due to fear of blame and a cumbersome reporting process.
3. Existing safety tools were designed by compliance teams without input from frontline workers, resulting in poor adoption.
4. Supervisors lacked real-time visibility into hazard patterns across shifts and locations.

Research Process

In-depth interviews

24 interviews with frontline workers, supervisors and safety officers across three sites. We held the sessions on site to build trust and surface the unspoken norms that shape daily behaviour.

Ride alongs

We accompanied workers through full shifts, from pre-task briefings to post-shift handovers. A full shift shows the decision points: where a shortcut gets taken, and why it makes sense to the person taking it.

Survey

A structured survey of 320 workers across all sites, measuring safety attitudes, tool adoption and how often people believed incidents occurred. We segmented the results by role, experience and shift pattern.

Audit of the existing system

We audited the safety reporting system in use: logging flows, completion rates, error patterns, time to submit. Filing a single near-miss report took 14 steps.

Focus groups

Five focus groups, each with 8–10 workers of mixed seniority. We used them to test the findings from the ethnographic phase and to co-develop the problem framing.

Research Outputs

• 12 behavioural triggers that lead to unsafe acts, mapped to the task contexts and environmental conditions where they occur.
• A journey map of a safety incident end to end, from hazard recognition through reporting to resolution, with 6 critical failure points marked.
• 5 design principles for safety-critical interfaces, based on the cognitive load of the operational environment.

Workshops and Ideation

Three co-design workshops brought workers, supervisors, safety officers and digital product teams into the same room to sketch, prototype and stress-test concepts.

Ideation Outputs

• A redesigned safety reporting workflow, cut from 14 steps to 3, with photo capture and voice-to-text for low-literacy contexts.
• A visual risk dashboard concept, so supervisors could see hazard hotspots and near-miss trends across shifts in real time.

Outcome and Impact

The reporting tool launched. Six months on:

47% reduction in unreported near-miss incidents.

30% → 78% increase in daily safety check completion across all three sites.

200+ workers trained on the new digital safety tools, with average onboarding under 20 minutes.

Top-3 hazard categories identified and addressed through physical interventions co-designed with site engineers.

Supervisor visibility moved from weekly paper reports to a live dashboard updated every 15 minutes.

Zero lost-time injuries in the 90 days following full rollout. The longest injury-free period in the site’s recorded history.

Recognised by the client as a template for rollout across their 8 other operational sites globally.

---

More detail on this project can be shared in an interview or portfolio review.