Valuing Our People

Maintaining high levels of employee engagement, embedding sustainability and ensuring the health and safety of our employees enables us to operate effectively and to continue to attract and retain talent.

Employee engagement

In FY09, our employee engagement score was 82 per cent, which is above the Global High Performing Companies Norm as measured by Towers Perrin-ISR.

Our high employee engagement score is particularly encouraging in light of the uncertainty of the economic climate at the time of the survey. This is a credit to our culture, which has enabled us to maintain an engaged and loyal workforce despite the need to downsize. The survey also found that 90 per cent of respondents are proud of our contribution to the community and 81 per cent feel there are sufficient opportunities to receive training to improve skills.

Diversity and flexibility

We value diversity, aiming to create a vibrant and inclusive workforce, reflective of the communities in which we operate. Whilst committed to promoting all dimensions of diversity, our focus to date has been on gender equity, disability and Indigenous Australians.

Our commitment to diversity has been strengthened by accommodating the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA) in our head office, providing workstations and IT facilities free of charge. DCA is an independent, not-for-profit diversity adviser to businesses in Australia. This arrangement provides us with the opportunity to collaborate with the DCA on ways that we can enhance diversity within our workplace.

Capability development

Our capability development strategy this year responded to the economic environment and needs of the business. This included building internal training capability, encouraging on-the-job development and developing cost-effective training.

We provided around three training days per employee in the reporting period and continue to budget 2.5 per cent of payroll for training annually. We have focused on delivering management programs to build capability and ultimately, reduce turnover.

Employee health and safety

In FY09 we experienced no serious employee injuries and our employee lost time injury frequency rate of 2.6 was lower than our target of 4.0. Our target rate for FY10 is 2.0.

We launched an incident reporting and investigation system (IRIS) in January 2009. IRIS is a customised web-based system that facilitates reporting of incidents and provides an efficient method of recording, reporting and retrieving incidents as well as improved analysis of incident characteristics.