[CULTURE AND WORKFORCE]

[Karen Hutchison] (1:14:30 - 1:16:35)
Welcome, and thank you all for joining us today for what's definitely going to be an engaging and interactive discussion. The topic of today is organizational culture and workforce. And to give you some context for why that is going to be such an engaging topic, E&Y's Global Mining and Metals COE 2023 and 2024 reports on key opportunities and risks in the sector identified ESG as the top risk and opportunity for the last two years running, and workforce was also in the top 10 for both years.

And that really leads us back to the topic of culture as such an important topic in the sector, because it's a critical underpinning of both. And because it's a topic with so much ambiguity and complexity, because organizational culture, local culture, emerging technologies, and the opportunity to use automation all influence one another. And because given like all of the other pressures competing for the time of mining leaders, it takes a lot of strategic focus to keep culture at the top of the agenda.

So today we're going to touch on two of the trickiest areas within the topic of culture and workforce, inclusive leadership, and effective leadership of a multi-generational workforce. There are no easy answers. So as I said, this is sure to be an engaging discussion.

I'm very grateful to our panelists for taking the time to share their lens on these challenges and to offer their insights so that we can learn from each other. So this is a discussion where we're honored to have with us two such distinguished guests. We have Deshnee Naidoo, who is a global mining executive and former CEO of Vale Base Metals, and she has made notable progress in evolving culture during her tenure.

We also have Natascha Viljoen, the COO of Newmont Corporation, who are leaders in the area of ESG. Natascha and Deshnee, thank you and welcome.

[Natascha Viljoen]
Thank you, Karen.

[Deshnee Naidoo] (1:16:36 - 1:16:37)
Thank you, Karen.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:16:37 - 1:17:39)
I'm going to dive right in on the topic of inclusive leadership. I'm going to take a pause for a second to just define what we mean by inclusive leadership before I ask you our first couple of questions. And I want to just note under the topic of inclusive leadership, how cool it is to have a discussion about mining leadership between three women today.

So very exciting. Inclusive leadership, if we think about a definition, is a leadership style that values diversity, promotes a sense of belonging, and actively seeks to include people from different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences in decision-making processes and organizational activities. So it's an attitude of more minds, more diverse thought, better decisions, better organization.

When we think about inclusive leadership, and I'll offer, you know, Deshnee, Natascha, either of you who wants to jump in first on this one. What strategies, from your point of view, can companies employ to cultivate inclusive leadership and what are the benefits that come with it?

[Deshnee Naidoo] (1:17:40 - 1:21:03)
Yeah, I can go first. Karen, is this okay? So thank you so much, EY, Karen, and the team for inviting us to have this conversation.

I think we can all say, you know, through the many years that we've been in the industry and gone are the days where we call culture and anything to do with people soft issues. These are now core issues, and it's great for us to be taking the time to have these kinds of conversations. So thank you so much for enabling it.

Yeah, so Karen, you dive straight into it in terms of, you know, some of those strategies. I think you rightly said it in the beginning. There's something here about how the space has been evolving.

You know, if I think about my tenure in executive roles and what I perhaps might do differently going forward in order to make sure that, you know, this is better set up. You know, we have to design, enable and demonstrate inclusive leadership. And in order to get that right, and I always love talking about the hard wiring of this, you know, the systems, processes and behavioral components that need to all come together.

I'll just touch very quickly on, you know, what I mean by this. So on systems, you know, inclusive leadership architecture must be designed for an organization, you know, taking into account where the business is and hence the focus areas. But, of course, no system can be designed without there being clarity on leadership commitment and how that translates into goals, into policies, as well as into actions.

I want to talk about key processes. I think it's so quick for us to jump into the people processes that I'm talking about. And yes, that's one way of getting inclusive leadership through the organization, you know, where we are far more intentional about how we are doing our training and development, how we're doing recruitment and hiring, you know, be it blind CV screening, analyzing exit interviews, how we do mentorships, DE&I, etc.

But I'm calling for something else, you know, when it comes to key processes and actually looking at how do we do business reviews? How are we making sure that we have, you know, included all the voices that can be added to those conversations? Similarly with audits.

And I can go on about what I mean by inclusion in key processes, but I want to touch very quickly on the behavioral side of this. So, at Vale, you know, we designed something called the Learning Together One Pager. I still remember it, although I've been out of the organization for five months already.

And what it was, it was the key behaviors that, you know, was our how. So, after the purpose and then the values defining the what, the behaviors was the how. And they were around obsession with safety and risk management, open and transparent dialogue, empowerment with accountability, sense of ownership, and active listing and engagement with society.

But these were not just, you know, five things that stood on a piece of paper. We really brought it to life, be it, you know, when we started a meeting and we started it with behavior shares, you know, be it how us as leaders would also take turns to do those kinds of shares. So, Natascha will touch on a lot, so I don't want to go through, you know, more than that.

But there's something there about, you know, when all of that comes together, how do we as leaders then add the practice side? And like I said, the behavior shares, etc.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:21:04 - 1:21:25)
I love that you talked about making it real through behaviors, because we think about culture. Culture is the way we do things. And the way that our top leaders do things will influence the way the rest of the organization does things as well.

I think our audience might be curious about what the behavioral shares are. So, before I throw it to Natascha, could you just tell us a little bit about how that worked at Vale?

[Deshnee Naidoo] (1:21:25 - 1:22:48)
Yeah, so this whole page had our purpose, which was to improve lives and transform the future together. Then we had our values, also starting with safety. And then it went on to the behaviors, the levers, and our ambitions.

So, every meeting deck, and I know we try to get away from decks, every meeting deck started off with the one pager, and then we would pick the one. So, say, sense of ownership. Perhaps someone struggled through a project, and it was that sense of community, sense of ownership that at least got us through it.

So, we will celebrate that. But equally, and I think this is where psychological safety comes into it, we would also encourage learnings. Tell me, tell us where it didn't go well.

Yes, we should have done a project in a certain way, but we didn't come up with this community approach, and this is where it went wrong. I've learned something. So, Eduardo, our CEO, used to love talking about vulnerability and fallibility.

This was it. It's how do we draw on those behaviors to tangible examples. Just like how we in the mining industry are so used to the safety shares, we then started having, you know, safety share and all behavior shares at the start of meetings.

But it was something, you know, if you go through, I think almost every person across Vale, they would be able to recite the one pager, and it's the one pager that stands in front of every operation, every business, every corporate office.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:22:50 - 1:22:58)
Great, great. Natascha, interested in your point of view, what would you add or any points of difference from what we just heard from Deshnee?

[Natascha Viljoen] (1:22:59 - 1:25:46)
I think Deshnee has covered so much of this question already, Karen, perhaps, and building a little bit on the richness of what she started to touch on is some real examples of the influence that this have, this kind of examples of cultural change, symbol systems and behaviors, and how that drives cultural change to improve inclusion. And inclusion in itself is such a wonderful, broad concept, and it allows everyone to find where they fit in. And it is interesting that we're talking purpose, we're talking system symbols and behaviors.

My experience in this is that it only holds true and become real when you have that same language coming through when you talk to an operator and a maintainer. Very often as a leadership of big organizations, we have really rich conversations on a really senior level, but the cascade of that down into operator and maintainer level doesn't hold the same level of richness. So out of experience, it was interesting where I had a conversation with my senior leadership team on a strategy, and the way they apply the strategy back to me was so vastly different between just the senior leaders.

And we then realized if we as a senior leadership hold so many different perspectives on the same sense of purpose or culture, or even the topic of inclusivity, is how different would this be when you cascade this through the organization? We then did that through working through a cross section in the organization to really find how it resonates with different levels and with different people in the organization, how people link to that purpose and values. And found that we, on a very senior level, people connected with these topics to make the world a greener place.

On an operator and maintainer level, it was about educating my children. And I think if we think through the broader principle of inclusivity, inclusivity across the spectrum of the organization is as important as we think around inclusivity on a lateral level, because that brings the full richness of the organization together.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:25:47 - 1:26:06)
Well, I thought that is such a, I haven't, I haven't, that's a unique lens. So when you think about inclusivity, you're thinking about how do we make sure at all levels of the organization have a voice? So equality of people, maybe hierarchy of roles, but we're all the same, all of our voices matter is what you're saying is according to the way you view it.

[Natascha Viljoen] (1:26:07 - 1:26:42)
And I think at the heart of that becomes, comes the point of all work is important work. And you need to bring all the bits of work together to ultimately deliver a broader purposeful outcome, a shareholder outcome, a social stakeholder outcome. If you don't bring that work together and see that as a portion, and that's why I was saying, it's such a wonderful, broad concept.

If you really start to dig into the richness of it, you can think about it in very interesting ways.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:26:42 - 1:27:03)
Well, that is, yeah, I love that. And, and so my next question was around examples of how senior leaders role model those inclusive behaviors and how that influences a company culture. I think you've given us a little bit of that in your answer.

So maybe I'll, I'll throw it back to Deshnee and, and just ask her to comment on that in particular.

[Deshnee Naidoo] (1:27:04 - 1:32:36)
Yeah, there's an idea. I love what Natascha said. And, you know, one of the key behaviors I spoke about there was listening or active listening, which is very different, right?

And what I found, you know, through some of the work we did on the, on the turnaround last year, it was almost more important to start these sessions with just active listening sessions, rather than going to communicate what it is the company was moving towards. And I had actually one of my executives start that and I couldn't tell you how, how that shifted, how people exactly as Natascha said, how people saw the program and how they felt that their voice was truly being heard. Because even if we couldn't do what, what they asked us to, the fact that we listened and took it into consideration was incredibly meaningful.

So I think we also, you know, evolving into what does that look like? So, so maybe I'll go back into some of the examples and extension of what Natascha said. You know, this topic has made me really think and really reflect on what does this truly mean?

You know, when I think of inclusive behaviors, there's only one sort of leader that comes to mind, and that's an empathetic leader. And empathetic leaders are leaders that actually show employees, they show their peers that they truly care. You know, when things get tough, we're showing respect, we're making sure that there's respect for everyone's perspectives.

And something that, you know, I think when I came through the ranks many, many years ago, seemed almost taboo to blur the lines of that holistic individual, you know, in terms of family and work. And for me, an empathetic leader sees an holistic person. There's no longer that very rigid lines between bring yourself to work, but I don't want to know what's happening behind the scenes.

I think that's the empathy leaders, you know, need to emulate. So, and there's many ways, Karan, again, stuff that I've done, I've seen other leaders do, you know, Natascha's just left Anglo Platinum. I was so encouraged during the South African Women's Month to see Craig Miller spending a night shift in one of the mines there.

That's incredible in terms of truly walking the talk. So, you know, formalized time for sharing and learning. I mentioned some of the things on how to, you know, how we reflect in meetings, how we make sure that there's retrospective views being brought in.

You know, I've had a lot to learn about what it is to be truly open and authentic. And not that I'm not naturally, but, you know, coming to the ranks, especially as a woman, you know, it's been so tough for us to show that maybe we don't know everything and maybe we're not, you know, the smartest person sometimes. And I can say, you know, through my experience, the minute you let your guard down and be very open about it, the cascading impact is multifold.

You know, we never make things, never make things personal. So you challenge ideas, not people, you know, address problems directly. And I'd love to have more conversation about that because that's something that coming into Canada and working in Brazil, it's a constant feedback I got about how direct I can come across.

And maybe lastly on, you know, some of those examples is around, you know, cultural context. Never get into a situation where you don't have some appreciation for the different backgrounds and cultures of the people that you're talking to, because that does really change the nuances of how things are observed. So maybe I just want to, you know, end this by giving you some of the stuff I did and found effective from other leaders.

You know, I was almost maybe notorious or infamous for deliberately spending more time on the operations than I did in corporate office last year, in fact, in the last two years. But that was very deliberate on my part because of where the business was and where I knew the face time needed to be. And I would always prioritize the game bus.

And this was now, you know, the leadership in the field acts and not just the normal times. I would do it on the night shift. I would do it on weekends.

And because there's such a different lens when you're on sites in the middle of the night and speaking to those frontline workers, supervisors at night, I didn't leave it to our own employees only. I would deliberately go into some of the OEM workshops on weekends as well to see how they were set up and how things worked there. I'd always prioritize on any of my visits, you know, time with the frontline, as I mentioned, the time with women, both in the community as well as in our organization.

And yeah, there's always that, you know, as a female leader, you're spending time with women and what does it matter or mean? And for me, it was spending time with all currently and previously marginalized groups, but making the real effort to do that. And I mentioned the listening sessions, and I experienced that firsthand, the power of a leader going in and not having much to say or having less to say and more to listen and the follow through of that and the impact that a follow through has when you're in that kind of situation.

So a pocket there, but there's a lot in that current in terms of the strategies that we can look at.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:32:37 - 1:33:29)
Yeah, a lot in that. And what I'm taking away is this notion of listening first. So having empathy, putting yourself in people's shoes, understanding their context and then communicate, because then you're going to know you're going to meet them where they are and their ability to hear you.

Yeah, with the right information at the right time and from their lens. So I love that. I'm going to throw it back to Natascha for a second, because I want to just segue like maybe just 10 degrees.

You talked a lot about how you and other leaders have really role modeled a different kind of way of interacting with the organization. And I'd like to get your sense of how important is the way that leaders show up to the overall culture of the organization. So how does leadership affect culture?

Natascha, I'll start with you on that one.

[Natascha Viljoen] (1:33:31 - 1:38:23)
Thanks, Karen. I think it's such an interesting question. I think the first answer to that question that comes to mind is leadership affects culture.

Leaders always create a culture. If that is just the reality, the opportunity that we have as leaders is how are we deliberate in defining the culture that we want to create and how our leadership behaviors and our business symbols and systems support the culture that we want to create. The counter to that is if you're not clear on what that culture is that you work towards and how your symbols and systems and behaviors will support that is that you will reinforce the unconscious culture that you are creating.

And perhaps it might be worthwhile. Deshnee started early in her response to talk about symbol systems and behaviors. And she also reflected there quickly on Craig Miller, who's the current CEO of Anglo-American Platinum.

And Craig and I worked together when I was CEO of Anglo-Platinum before. And I want to probably use a quick example on how leadership behavior impacts culture. This is a South African mining context example.

But the reality is it is valid for any mining context. I've seen this in Australia. I've seen this in Ghana.

I've seen this in the US. And we had a real challenge with sexual harassment in the workplace. And it was despite the fact that we as leaders were talking the talk and talking about the fact that it is something that we do not tolerate.

It's something that we have zero tolerance for. And that's not part of our culture. Our underlying system of how events get reported and investigated was not supportive of what we were talking about.

In addition to that, our behaviors in how we responded to matters of sexual harassment also didn't support the culture that we wanted to create. And we had to be very deliberate, firstly, to understand that our current culture was one that condones sexual harassment. Firstly, the culture we wanted to create is to create an inclusive culture where everybody is psychologically and physically safe to come to work on a daily basis, doing their best work.

So we had to start with physical workplace conditions. Are those constructive for inclusivity? Our systems and processes of where there are issues, are they reported in a safe and respectful way?

And are they investigated in a safe and respectful way? The example that Deshnee has spoken about was interestingly enough that it was a group of men who took on and led by example to show that this is what men's behavior should be. And they led a big portion of that campaign, going underground and talking to females working underground, really understanding their workplace realities and how they take their workplace realities back home.

Women who get up at 3 o'clock in the morning, make their way to work, leaving their kids back at home, going underground, no way of communicating with their children during the day. And those are the levels of inclusivity that you start to think about. But you can see how everybody plays a role in it.

And only when we started to, as leaders, show a different behavior, we addressed all of our systems on our performance management systems, our reporting systems, our investigative systems. We started to see a confidence level in women returning. And then, of course, there is the reality of other systems and processes, like making sure that you are recruiting for inclusivity, that you build in quite a bit of those processes as well in that leadership behavior.

Now, it was interesting to see how that gets reality here at Newmont for us as well. We, leaders, role model the behaviors that we want to see in terms of inclusivity.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:38:26 - 1:39:08)
Now, let's turn to another key aspect from today's discussion and hear your views. What's the biggest organizational challenge your organization faces in building a skilled workforce for future operations? Is it A, attracting talent in a competitive market?

B, retaining skilled employees? C, training and upskilling existing employees? Or D, adapting to new technologies?

Please take a moment and respond to the poll. And thank you for your continued engagement. You mentioned symbols, systems, and behaviors.

So is leadership behavior that symbolic element that you're referring to? Or is it more than that?

[Natascha Viljoen] (1:39:11 - 1:41:53)
There is how you behave in a moment. And how do you show up on a daily basis? Do you show up on a night shift?

Do you really go into Deshnee's point listening, servant leadership? And how do you show that listening by closing out the listening process? As an example, I'm fairly new into Newmont starting in October.

And the kind of impact that you have, and this is a totally probably outside the narrative or the concept of inclusivity conversation. But the listening on where I've listened to challenges that we have in the workplace, followed up and took that out of the way, out of supervision layers, superintendent layers, middle management layers. The impact you have on people that the voice is important.

And it doesn't matter what they, when you listen, do you come back and you close it out? Do you give them feedback? And it's not about me, but for the role of a COO to give feedback when a supervisor or a superintendent writes something with you, that is the kind of behaviors that I'm talking about.

The symbols are symbols like when you talk about a foreman, the whole concept of still using man in any of your, whether it's your role descriptions, signage up in the workplace. Those are all symbols. Other symbols could be PPE.

Do we really pay attention to how you create PPE for females? So it's those kinds of symbols that comes to play. It's quite often you have to look out for it.

It's not that obvious until somebody points it out. And again, when you have a group of diverse colleagues walking around on site and paying attention to those symbols that might be around. Another very popular symbol is symbols where you have exclusivity.

You have a manager parking lot. You have a change room for certain levels in the organization. So it is that symbols of where you separate people into class, which you want to be on the lookout for.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:41:53 - 1:42:08)
I'm going to change the topic over to talking about the multi-generational workforce very shortly. Deshnee, before I do, I want to give you a chance to talk as well. Anything you would add to what Natascha has shared in terms of the importance of leadership on culture?

[Deshnee Naidoo] (1:42:09 - 1:43:27)
I think Natascha and I are incredibly aligned on a lot of that. I see maybe the symbol, and it also depends on the phase of the transformation journey that you are trying to run, be it the cultural transformation. For me, a symbol is something that's almost used to create a mindset shift, but a very deliberate one.

You know, we've been dealing with this for 10 years. I came in, I saw it, I did something about it. So everything else is going to take time, but you start to build trust by then coming in and taking away something that's caused frustration.

I see it more as a deliberate, high-intensity act, or it can be, to show that things are changing, the culture is evolving, although the rest of it will take time. But just in terms of leadership cohesion, I really like what Natascha said. Sometimes we struggle with that alignment amongst leaders.

Imagine when you start cascading some of this down the organization. And I completely agree that collectively aligned leadership team, ones that hold each other to account, exemplifying our values, key behaviors, is possibly, I would say, the biggest source of nourishment for a healthy culture.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:43:28 - 1:45:00)
Nice. So I'm going to switch topics slightly, talk about leading a multigenerational workforce. And of course, everyone's always led multigenerational workforces.

That's not new. There's always been a need to think about how you manage the different values and styles and preferences of different generations as they work together. However, I think today's multigenerational workforce is compounded in complexity because of the influence of technology.

And I think too, to a certain extent, by the different propensities for different life stages for wanting to engage in remote work versus being on site. So we've got technology advances. We've got the post-COVID impacts of people wanting to work remotely, creating differences in the dynamic of how we manage a multigenerational workforce.

I invite you to share your perspectives by answering a quick polling question. What do you believe is the biggest challenge in achieving effective multigenerational collaboration in the workplace? Is it A, communication styles?

B, technological adaptability? C, different work-life balance expectations? D, varied motivational drivers?

Or E, leadership styles? Please take a moment and respond to the poll. Before we get into that, I want to ask a first question just about skills in general.

So what are your views on the skills shortages we're seeing across the sector? And what should we be thinking as an industry when it comes to addressing that challenge? And Natascha, I'll throw that to you first.

[Natascha Viljoen] (1:45:01 - 1:50:23)
Yeah, again, a very, very interesting conversation. So firstly, I think when you look at skills and you've touched on the fact that is it a real shortage of skills or what are we looking at? Because I think if we consider global population and the distribution of people globally, we see that there are areas that where you have your demographics that is appropriately spread across age.

In certain areas and predominantly in the developed world is skewed to an inverted triangle as opposed to some of our developing world. And it's in Africa, interestingly enough, it's probably the best example of still having a triangle. India's starting is looking slightly different.

But then you have some of your areas like Japan and other areas that you've got a very different kind of demographic. And I think that is important because when we start to talk about skills, I think we also not only need to think about the actual skill, but also the demographic and where our workforce is going to come from in the future. And it's interesting that it links really nicely to your inclusivity conversation here as well, because that inclusivity is going to become a requirement for us to make sure that we have the right skills that will have to be in addition to all your points on curiosity, ability to manage change, design thinking, the ability to deal with complexity on a level that we have not necessarily been necessary to deal with. There's also the complexity of thinking around skills as being a global pool of skills and not only the skills that we have in the countries we're operating in. I think I've done a bit of work in the future of work not too long ago.

And in addition to having the right base skill in the disciplines that we are working in, which by the way is also changing on how you obtain that skill, it would be these other less tangible kind of skills that we're talking about that we've just mentioned. Ability to work with complexity and all of those examples. The other thing that from a mining perspective that we need to consider is the fact that mining generally doesn't have a very...

People, the perspective around mining is negative. The broader world either do not appreciate what mining is about. I stand amazed in all my travels across the world on how many people we talk about that say mining.

What does mining do? We recently had somebody joining from an adjacent industry who literally said that he thought we were still doing hammers and chisels underground and didn't realise the extent to which mining has developed. Now, if we consider the requirement for critical minerals to not only sustain our current modern lifestyle but to bring more people into a modern lifestyle, we're talking about the electrification of the world and just some of the basic needs of human civilisation.

Without mining, we either grow it or we mine it. That's the reality of it. That's where everything comes from.

And without us building that appreciation, I think the first challenge we are going to have is to attract those right skills, even though we might have a broader view on skills and where that can come from is attracting people into the industry. And then for our industry to stay abreast with what a very diverse, in terms of age demographics, expectation of work is. You've spoken about flexibility of work.

From an inclusivity point of view, you need a different level of flexibility of work, over and above the expectation from a different generation on how they define quality of life, how they define a career that fits their lifestyle. And then the reality, to come to my point on developing the skills, is when I grew up, my father, the generation before us, worked for the same company for 30 to 40 years. Some of them having the same role for 30 or 40 years.

For our generation, that's already changed quite a bit. For the next generation, they will make fundamental career changes in their lifetime. So if you consider that from a changing demographic and a changing expectation of work, then I think it makes for a very different conversation when we come to how we think about skills in the workplace, how we design work, how we design the organization, and how we design the workplace.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:50:25 - 1:50:44)
Wow, yeah, thank you for that. I mean, if you think about all those things, plus globally, the models being different in terms of what generations are working together and what proportion, I can see why it's such a complex issue and a challenging one. Deshnee, what would you add to what Natascha's just shared?

Or any differing viewpoints?

[Deshnee Naidoo] (1:50:45 - 1:52:43)
Yeah, so I think as Natascha was going on, in terms of skill supply and demand, I don't believe we have an acute shortage. If you look at global supply and demand, perhaps it's not exactly where we need it to be. So I was reflecting slightly differently on just all of the people-related factors that are converging on the mining industry today.

That's actually making some of these local issues that much more exacerbated. So when it comes to technical skills, yes, we are facing a technical SME, subject matter expert cleft. There are reasons for that because we basically drive this industry as a boom-bust industry.

And a boom-bust industry means that we don't always create sustainable pipelines for people. And we are now paying the price for some of those bust days that we've had not so long ago. I would like to reimagine mining where technology innovation, be it remote, autonomous, automation, digital, circularity, decarbonization, is actually the core of how we need to do things.

Then we redesign work, taking into account jobs that should be on-site, jobs that should be remote, in hubs, designing that and how best to leverage partnerships. Then designating, because we have the opportunity when you're redesigning, to designate roles for previously and currently marginalized individuals. And on the local stakeholder front, because I believe we're never going to be successful in the industry because we're still trying to fix and address our trust issues.

So on local stakeholders, in particular indigenous communities, to design an ecosystem with mining as the anchor neighbor, rather than because of mining. Because mining becomes the, I would say the unhealthy dependency at times within a community, especially when mines are coming to the end of their life.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:52:43 - 1:54:00)
Yeah, that's really inspiring. So this notion of very similar to how you would engage the employee population, where you listen first. It's a stakeholder first.

It's an outcomes first. It's a, what do we, you know, think about the, begin with the end in mind when we have a mine site that you think is called for in order to really address the skill shortage and engage new generations and new kinds of skill sets in mining as an industry. And to finish, here's the last polling question for today's discussion.

What aspect of the future of work do you believe will most significantly influence operations for the next five years? Is it A, remote and flexible work arrangements? B, increased use of AI and machine learning?

C, upskilling and reskilling of the workforce? Or D, greater emphasis on employee wellbeing and mental health? We value your perspective.

So please share your responses in the poll. And thanks again for taking your time to provide your inputs. I'm conscious of the time.

So Natascha, I'm going to throw it to you and ask you for any closing thoughts on what it would take to really address the next generation and engage them in the sector.

[Natascha Viljoen] (1:54:03 - 1:54:46)
I think we've probably touched on it from your first questions on inclusivity right through Deshnee's point on re-imagining what mining could look like. Those are the kind of things that attracts a younger generation who defines value and purpose different to some of the older generations. And it is how we attract not only the minds, but the hearts first.

And we will capture the minds. So linking the mining industry purpose to personal purpose, I think is becoming even more important for the current up and coming generation.

[Karen Hutchison] (1:54:47 - 1:55:08)
Well said. I just want to say by way of reflection on this conversation, thank you both so much for your insights. This has been so engaging and you're so insightful.

I want to say that leaders like you who have these different ways of leading and looking at work are going to do a lot as well. Really appreciate it.

[Deshnee Naidoo] (1:55:10 - 1:55:13)
Thank you, Karen. Thank you, Karen. Thank you, Natascha.

[Theo Yameogo] (1:55:15 - 1:55:19)
Well, well, this did not really disappoint Kaki.

[Kaki Giauque] (1:55:20 - 1:55:21)
Not at all.

[Theo Yameogo] (1:55:22 - 1:56:24)
Yeah, so let's highlight two critical insights with her. First, you know, both leaders talked about fostering diversity in thoughts and experience among employees. And I think this is important because most of the time we forget that diversity is not just in gender.

There's a variety of areas where we need to have diversity so that we can enhance our problem solving and offer competitive edge. The second one is really adapting the strategies so that we can actually manage and integrate a diverse team. Because you can bring the teams to the table, but if you're not managing that diversity, you lose the value.

And so that's why having a strong or building a strong organization culture is key to success. Now, you know, being a diversity, a diverse person yourself, I want to hear, Kaki, how you see this and how, you know, you actually leaving that diversity and how you're managing the teams so that we can attract the next generation of talent.

[Kaki Giauque] (1:56:25 - 1:57:03)
Yeah, many organizations, including EY, are embracing inclusive hiring, diversity training and creating cultures where feedback drives meaningful change. But it's crucial to continuously evaluate and update policies to keep pace with evolving needs. Equally important, and I believe this very strongly, is introducing mentorship programs that not only focus on technical skills, but on developing management and leadership abilities.

This holistic approach ensures we're not just attracting diverse talent, but also empowering that next generation of leaders.

[Theo Yameogo] (1:57:04 - 1:57:24)
Thanks, Kaki. So that concludes the morning session for our forum. I will now take a break and be back here for our next session at 2 p.m. Eastern. We look forward to seeing you back very soon to kick off the afternoon session. Trust me, it's full of other insightful parts that you wouldn't want to miss. Thank you.