TAX
Over time, we’ ve come to see four distinct productivity taxes repeatedly emerge across mining operations:
Connectivity tax This refers to the cost of broken information flow between the plan and the face. Most mines today are not short on data – dispatch systems track fleet movement in real time, maintenance systems monitor equipment status continuously, and production targets are documented in detail. Yet many operations remain what we would describe as“ data-rich but decision-poor”. In order to be effective, the right information needs to reach the right person at the right moment, in a form they can act on during the shift itself.
In many operations, supervisors spend between 24 % and 29 % of their shift in meetings and administration instead of on the floor. This creates long windows where no structured observation is taking place, no deviation is being corrected, and no real-time coaching is happening, and the operational effect compounds.
Problems are addressed only after they have already disrupted the plan, and by the time decisions are escalated and discussed, the production window has already narrowed or disappeared entirely.
One of the most obvious examples is blasting performance underground. At several operations, crews average 1.2 blasts per shift against a planned target of 1.5. On paper, a 0.3 shortfall may seem marginal, but across six crews, this translates into a 20 % reduction in face advance every shift. Over a month, the financial impact becomes enormous.
The same pattern appears in maintenance: Mean Time To Repair( MTTR) often stretches to six to 10 hours against a world-class benchmark of four to six hours, with each minute that intervention is delayed removing productive hours from the system permanently.
Resilience tax
What often looks like a production problem is, in reality, a communication and leadership problem.
Mining is inherently one of the most volatile industries that exists. Equipment breaks – regularly. Conditions change. Targets move. The operations that are healthy and resilient recover within the shift, while fragile or unstable operations allow disruption to collapse the plan entirely. Thus,“ resilience tax” refers to the cost of a workforce and culture unable to absorb disruption effectively.
Velocity tax " Velocity tax” encompasses the cost of slow decisions and reactive execution, and is arguably the most expensive tax of all because it multiplies across the entire mining cycle.
Across many sites, OIM’ s assessments show that 91 % of supervisors operate reactively rather than proactively.
Our behavioural and safety data shows that many operations are carrying significant fragility within the system – on average, emotional control scores 53 %, while resilience sits at 61 %. Under pressure, unsafe behaviours spike significantly and teams become reactive rather than disciplined. The Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate( TRIFR) across some sub- Saharan African operations remain between 2.5 and 4.5 times above global benchmarks, and every serious incident brings not only human cost, but lost production days and operational instability.
It is important to bear in mind that resilience is not about“ warm and fuzzy” culture programmes, but operational capability under pressure, and the ability of supervisors and crews to stabilise performance when things deviate from the plan.
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