Health, safety and wellbeing

The expectations that apply to every Woodside asset and employee across all of our business locations are defined in Our Code of Conduct, our Health and Safety Policy and our Working Respectfully Policy. All employees, contractors and joint venture participants engaged in activities under Woodside’s operational control, are responsible for the application of this approach. Woodside’s Management System sets mandatory requirements for working safely, including the systems and processes that we use to identify, assess and control risk by applying a consistent hierarchy of controls - our most effective protection is to design out risks.

Leaders aim to create a culture in which everyone is encouraged to speak up and intervene on safety issues, including an obligation to stop unsafe work. Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) is a contemporary perspective on how we can improve work and safety. HOP focuses on understanding the context and conditions of work, recognising the complex interactions between people and systems. The HOP approach aims to identify and amplify the good work that is already being undertaken in our business. It focuses on understanding and engaging those employees most familiar with tasks to optimises system conditions and, where possible, reduce constraints. Ultimately, the focus is on creating the conditions for success, not just avoiding failure or unwanted safety events. This approach is reflected in Our Values.

We engage with our workforce regularly to communicate safety information and to understand current and emerging safety issues. Location specific site inductions are used to familiarise workers with health and safety hazards and procedures. Regular communications channels include site-based pre-start meetings, safety event bulletins, and safety learning discussions.

We report and investigate health and safety events to understand risks and causes, and to implement corrective actions to mitigate impacts and to ensure that our controls are effective. This supports continuous improvement of our systems to help prevent recurrence.

Woodside has participated for many years in industry organisations such as IOGP and Safer Together, benchmarking performance and sharing best practice in achieving best possible safety outcomes.Health and Safety reporting is supported by a robust data structure that provides trusted insights. Technical experts actively monitor technological advancements for opportunities to put additional barriers between our people and hazards. The HaloGuard case study included in this section is a good example.

Our competency frameworks define the requirements for certain roles in our organisation, and are backed by training systems. These cover competencies such as risk management, process safety, emergency response procedures, human factors, and management of occupational health, including support for mental health and wellbeing. Process Safety Management (PSM) is of critical importance to avoid loss of control of hazardous substances which could result in a major accident and environmental event. Woodside aligns and assesses compliance of the management system and practices with the Energy Institute Process Safety Management Framework, which includes 20 elements across 4 areas:

• Process Safety Leadership
• Risk Identification and Assessment
• Risk Management
• Review and Improvement.

These elements remind us that safety focussed processes are essential in engineering design, maintenance, operations and projects where individuals, leaders and systems all play a role.

We recognise the critical importance of effective Process Safety Management (PSM) to avoid major accident and environmental events due to loss of control of hazardous substances. We continue to focus on process safety leadership to ensure consistent awareness of contemporary PSM approaches, organisational status, personal expectations, and accountabilities. In 2024, we focused on delivering PSM training, competency assessments and assurance of Process Safety Critical Roles (PSCRs) across global operations, we targeted 95% company-wide completion of competency and we delivered 93%. Future focus areas include continuing our efforts to embed stronger process safety culture, building competency across our hydrocarbon business, new energy and carbon business areas.

Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) is a contemporary perspective on how we can improve our work environment. HOP focuses on understanding the context and conditions of work, recognising the complex interactions between people and systems. The HOP approach aims to identify and amplify the good work that is already being undertaken in our business. It focuses on understanding and engaging those employees most familiar with tasks to optimise system conditions and, where possible, reduce constraints. Ultimately, the focus is on creating the conditions for success, not just avoiding failure or unwanted safety events. This approach is reflected in Our Values.

Workshops facilitated by global safety experts have been held across our global business to deepen our understanding of HOP and continue to embed HOP principles into our safety approach. In the first half of 2024, we have embedded the principals in our Field Leadership question sets and engagement activities to establish a learning environment. We have introduced Learning Teams, an innovative HOP approach for learning from normal work. Targeting high-risk tasks, we identified key factors that influence performance during task execution. We believe recommendations from this process supports the prevention of potential safety events and exceed the value of actions raised through traditional event investigations, as we can learn and mitigate risks without having to wait for a safety event to occur.

We recognise that the risk of noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) from exposure to workplace noise is one of our most common health risks. Our consistent approach across global operations to audiometric testing helps to identify NIHL cases at the earliest opportunity to initiate hearing conservation measures and prevent more debilitating illnesses. We aim to continuously improve our hearing conservation programs and focus on the effectiveness of the implemented controls.

Our wellbeing vision is to be recognised as an employer of choice. We aim to cultivate a work environment where everyone can flourish by focusing on people, work environment, and quality leadership. To achieve this, we have refreshed and expanded our Global Wellbeing Programs “The Thrive Hive” to focus on six key elements: (1) protecting from harm, (2) promoting health and wellbeing, (3) connection and community, (4) work-life balance, (5) opportunities for growth, and (6) meaning and purpose. Each element has a strategic goal, enabling activities and metrics identified to track progress, including the use of risk assessments and focus groups to seek regular feedback from our people.

Our occupational health management processes are designed to support the health and wellbeing of our employees and contractors. Medical surveillance and health services are established to ensure effective health screening and monitoring as well as support employees through the return-to-work process after medical leave. Our focus is to ensure that our workforce demonstrates a capacity for work and that their ongoing health and fitness is assessed at regular intervals. We continue to improve our insights by differentiating health events from safety events, allowing us to focus on, and manage, the hazards that can lead to health related illnesses. We aim to ensure the ongoing security and management of all personal information collected in accordance with our Code of Conduct and applicable legal and regulatory requirements through our privacy

We facilitate access to non-occupational medical and healthcare services through benefits such as gym membership subsidies, wellness reimbursements and health plans. Health related benefits are offered in all locations however they are not uniform in each location and vary by market practice and regulatory requirements. Human resources provide our fully subsidised Employee Assistance Program (EAP) which gives voluntary access to professional, confidential coaching and support for employees and eligible family members to promote wellbeing. All reporting from our EAP provider is aggregated and de-identified to maintain confidentiality.