Your voices, our values

At AngloGold Ashanti, we strive to be an inclusive and inspiring organisation. To ensure these aspirations are embedded within our organisational culture, it is important that we embrace and embody values to which the entire organisation feels connected.

We initiated our culture transformation journey in late 2021, through an organisation-wide conversation about the kind of culture that would enable our employees to thrive and deliver sustainable value to all stakeholders.

In the period leading up to that point, AngloGold Ashanti had experienced significant leadership changes, endured the impact of COVID-19, the sale of our last South African operation, and more recently the review of our operating model and organisational structure.

As an initial step to measure, understand and transform our organisational culture, we invited each employee to participate in the global culture survey to find out what we were doing well, where we were falling short and, importantly, what we should be doing better to build an inclusive and inspiring culture.

Throughout the process we worked hard to establish trust and encourage open participation. Launching and embedding our refreshed values marks the latest milestone of our journey.

Values are central to cultural change – both our personal values and those reflected in our stated values – and to how we work together and treat each other as individuals. Research supports the importance of value alignment and its correlation with job satisfaction and organisational commitment.

In 2022, we embarked on a process to revisit and re-launch our core values. These values form the foundation of our improved culture and will guide our behaviour in the way we interact with each other and with our stakeholders. They will also inform the decisions we make and how we behave, individually and as a business.

The process in short – how we arrived at our new values

We ran the Barret Culture Assessment survey globally and analysed the outcomes for key insights into existing personal values compared to desired culture values

• We took these insights to our executive and regional leadership teams and used them as a basis for engagement and understanding of local assessment results
• We applied learnings from the survey outcomes and various stakeholder engagement sessions into key focus areas and aligned the outcomes with our strategic human resource focus
• We grouped values themes according to personal values, current values and those values associated with the desired organisational culture
• We expanded our engagement to extensive listening circles where we received actionable inputs from our team members and further clarity on values focus areas
• We considered the impact of the Board as stewards and supporters of leadership in the evolution of organisational culture and considered Board-proposed values

We identified matches between personal, current and desired values and resolved to keep, evolve and strengthen these as our core values. Our refreshed values are therefore not a wholesale change of our previous core values, but rather an evolution and deepening of those values to make them relevant for our times.

We created an overarching brand for the revisited values that speaks specifically to ongoing listening, and interpretation of what we hear into a narrative that is meaningful to all of our people.

The refreshed values were initially launched to the Company’s senior operational leadership by Alberto Calderon (CEO), with the support of the executive team, on 22 February 2023. Regional leaders were provided with toolkits with which to launch and embed these values in each business unit and corporate centre. The values were launched across the organisation during March, 2023.

From there, all regions will begin embedding and reinforcing the values and their accompanying behaviours so they become the norm. In doing so, we will respect nuances in their interpretation and how they are expressed across our global sites.