Yamana Gold in Latin America

Context

Yamana Gold is a mid-sized multinational mining company operating in Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. In 2015 the company adopted a new approach to measuring health and safety, environmental and social risks across the company. As part of that approach, Yamana Gold has been working with CSIRO and now the spin-out company Voconiq to develop their social licence indices across all operational sites.

Problem

Even though social licence consistently featured prominently as a major risk in industry-wide reviews, Yamana Gold had found it difficult to mobilise resources and management attention, at various levels, around social licence risks because of a lack of systematic measurement. Having regular and structured site-by-site measurements of trust and acceptance, as well as the factors underpinning them, changed that.

Solution

In designing the company’s new social licence measure (based on Voconiq Local Voices data), Yamana Gold staff asked themselves – what does the general manager of a mine site really need to know about the community, and what does the CEO and the Board really want to know? Those principles fed through into two key features of the new measure.

The first feature is to ensure that it produces actionable, strategic data – to know what’s happening on the ground; what people think about the company; and how it can be improved. The second feature is to ensure that that data has direct visibility within the company – that it goes to site general managers, senior executives and board members.

Impact

Looking at some recent results, the company saw a significant dip in the trust scores at one of their sites (“Operation 3”), and while the scores were still above the ‘risk zone’, it immediately lead to action within the company. Within a week of those results coming into the company they had been communicated to the site general manager and community relations teams; to senior functional managers at headquarters. Through these informed conversations, and by digging deeper into the Local Voices data, the company was able to get a better sense of what was going on and what kind of actions they would need to take to address the drop in community trust.

 

Yamana Gold now also has the ability to consistently report on company wide social performance— through their Social Licence to Operate Indices—to the world via formal governance reports such as their Material Issues Report, the 2019 version is available here (page 44).

 

Listen as Director of Health, Safety and Sustainable Development Aaron Steeghs reflects on why Yamana Gold wanted Local Voices data and how it now uses it: