Improving FIFO Life: Transforming work camps into thriving communities
- BHP
- Research in action
- Minerals + Energy
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From camp to a thriving community.
The Opportunity
With FIFO accommodation villages often housing populations akin to medium-sized country towns, BHP fuelled a vision to transform these transient populations from working camps into thriving communities. The opportunity began by growing a baseline understanding of the range of attributes, amenities and indicators in order to foster improvement and a shared identity in these remote spaces.
Improving FIFO Life: Transforming work camps into thriving communities
- Client: BHP
- Service: Research
- Sector: Minerals + Energy
OUR APPROACH
Creating Communities worked with BHP to look at ways to improve life at its FIFO accommodation sites at nine iron ore mines in remote Western Australia. On average, these house more than 5,600 workers on any given day. BHP’s desire was to grow a deeper sense of community in these villages that historically been more as work camps.
BHP engaged Creating Communities to undertake research into each village’s facilities and services and to survey workers on the areas they believed could improve the amenities and value of community at each site.
In developing a robust research tool for the ongoing project, Creating Community utilised our Sociology of Community and Intentional Communities Models, each providing a framework for data gathering across clear spheres of community.
A key part of the upgrade was improving the quality of meals and providing better opportunities for social engagement between workers.
THE OUTCOMES
Creating Communities created a comprehensive research and engagement process, including a literature review, resident surveys and interviews, focus groups, on-site observations, interviews with village staff and independent contractors.
As a result of the research, BHP engaged food specialists, Future Foods, to design changes to the menus at their FIFO villages.
BHP has also included the need for village vendors to create more of a ‘home away from home’ as one of the key dimensions of their contract and service offering.
As a result of the success enjoyed in the nine FIFO villages, Creating Communities was subsequently contracted to undertake a similar process for BHP’s Olympic Dam operations in South Australia.
Transient work is an attractive option that many Western Australians make and we have found that it can work well for individuals, couples and families if they have a plan in how they will manage the experience and have good support structures in place. Having worked with mining companies since the boom, we have developed strategies to transform camps into village communities, to ensure people can have rich and full lives, regardless of their work choice.
Allan Tranter, Director
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