Anglo American

In 2023 and facing decreasing commodity prices and rising operational costs, global mining company Anglo American was falling behind production targets. Its general managers reported that gaps in the skills of site-based supervisors were contributing to the biggest capability priority. 

So in early 2024 the learning team conducted a needs analysis for supervisory effectiveness to validate the priority, as there were no documented requirements and inconsistent definitions of the target population.

They found that supervisors had become disengaged and felt consistently blamed by both site leadership and workers; there was confusion because of conflicting directions for supervisors and obsolete and/or irrelevant content in supervisory training and a lack of channels to get clarification from leaders. Furthermore, supervisors reported spending up to 80 per cent of their time doing administrative tasks rather than overseeing operations and, while they typically knew the technical details required, they did not enforce these in work approval requests received, resulting in inefficiency and unsafe work being approved to progress.

It was concluded that capability gaps were not down to a lack of training – supervisors had attended 48 learning courses over four years – but inadequate training. The team replaced existing technical refresher classroom training required every 18 months with a continual, scenario-based adaptive learning platform that targeted specific knowledge gaps and released allocated training time. With a general manager, safety leader, business improvement head and HR leader, they also co-designed and implemented a learning journey that developed supervisory awareness, mindset, skills, application and performance across two phases of the initiative: leading the team safely and operational excellence. 

The initiative was implemented between July and December 2024, covering 200 supervisors. Now, supervisors are spending significantly more time at the face overseeing operations (previously 20-35 per cent of their time, up to 65 per cent) and there is 23 per cent improvement in planned vs unplanned work – leading indicators of safety and operational performance. Time has been saved, and production has increased. 

The PMA judges said what was “particularly impressive” was “the recognition of having to adapt the delivery to take into account cultural, tribal differences as well as the mixed ability and accessibility of tech use” and hailed the “really impressive results” after one year of the programme. “With more time, these will only get stronger,” they said.