Development and training

Creating a learning organisation and ensuring every employee can work to their full potential and continuously develop and refine their technical, operational and management skill sets is core to the successful realisation of Xstrata’s business strategy. We seek high potential employees at every level and provide them with the support and tools they need to develop into our future team of skilled operators and business leaders.

We have maintained and in some cases expanded our investment in development and training. We have increased the average training hours provided across the Group per employee to 41.7 hours from 36.2 hours in 2009. Overall training spend has increased 5% from $63.5 million to $66.7 million, reflecting our increased investment in training and ongoing improvements in reporting.

All Xstrata employees receive regular performance reviews and for managers these are conducted at least annually. Individual job descriptions and action plans for all employees allow them to participate in the process of setting objectives to measure their own performance. We provide training for managers on how to conduct performance reviews and give effective feedback.

Other employee engagement includes monthly employee communication meetings, suggestion boxes, exit interviews, newsletters, intranet feedback mechanisms and employee representative committees. In line with our devolved business model, employee surveys are conducted regularly at the majority of our commodity businesses and their results are used to inform the development of business plans, human resource management strategies and working practices.

Apprenticeships, traineeships and scholarships

Whilst we recognise that like all businesses we will inevitably lose some talent to other organisations after training, we take a broad view of our obligation to develop and nurture young people from the communities in which we operate. Even those that go on to work for other organisations often stay closely linked to their home communities after they have moved away. This adds value to the localities around our sites, and by extension, to us and our operations. The training programmes that we offer provide an important introduction to the workplace and our industry for young people as well as developing a source of talented potential recruits for our businesses.

In 2010, we offered a total of 12,372 trades apprenticeships, graduate trainee positions, student work placements and scholarships across our operations. Xstrata provides a dedicated website for graduates and a section of our Group website where vacancies are listed. More information on the community benefits of Xstrata’s employment practices is available from the Community section.

Leadership development

Xstrata has a structured and strategic approach to leadership development that operates at various levels within the company. At Group level we put strong emphasis on identifying and developing tomorrow’s leaders.

Through our Accelerated Development Programme (ADP), we identify, train and mentor talented staff for a variety of future senior management positions. Each candidate gets senior executive mentor and a programme that is specifically tailored to his or her needs. The programme includes the opportunity to work in different functions around the business.

This kind of succession planning and leadership development is also practised at the commodity business level where high potential individuals at a broader range of levels (than those eligible for the ADP) get the chance to go through a structured training and education programme that includes:

• Vocational training;
• Management skills acquisition;
• Rotational placements to different areas of the Group; and
• Career development workshops.

In addition to the ADP, Xstrata also participates in an innovative initiative called the Global Business Consortium (GBC). This is a collaboration between six international companies whereby a small number of senior managers attend a programme over several months designed to build a broad understanding of value creation and strategy development. The programme compares the strategies and business models of the participating companies to help the managers gain a wider perspective. This breadth of experience benefits the individual and the sponsoring company.

As sustainability has become an integral part of our business strategy and the way we manage our projects and operations, our commodity businesses have focused on developing the sustainability skills and competencies of their management staff. In 2010, for example, Xstrata Nickel launched a programme focused on Xstrata’s SD Standard 1, Leadership, Strategy, and Accountability, that targeted management staff at site level. Third party external experts were used to assess site performance against the Standard, challenge perceptions and help site management develop associated improvement plans. Additional SD Standards such as Standard 5 on Risk and Change Management will be addressed under the programme during 2011.