Sustainable Workforce Highlights

IAG recognises that long term business success depends on attracting and retaining high performing people. Workplace flexibility promotes stronger staff commitment and performance and better business outcomes.

In today's competitive job market, attracting and retaining high performing people is crucial to the success of our business, and for our shareholders. Currently, 170,000 new people enter the workforce in Australia each year. From 2020, this will reduce by over 90% to 12,500 new entrants.¹ IAG recognises that long term success stems from building a workplace that's right for the 21st century, and from having employees who enjoy their jobs.

We've been investing in our people in a number of ways.

• We've been working hard to improve the 'engagement' of our employees, which is a measure of the emotional and intellectual connection that people have with the organisation. In our Australian operations, our engagement score lifted from 56% to 61%, putting us into the 'high performance zone'. But we have more work to do across our international business operations to see consistently good results.
• We've been training our managers in how to implement flexible working arrangements for employees. At IAG, flexibility means focusing on outcomes and deliverables rather than hours worked. In practice, this means flexibility in when work is done (e.g. varying start and finish times and part time work), where work is done (e.g. working from home), and how work is done (e.g. sharing jobs, restructuring jobs to meet different timing), as well as providing different career paths and opportunities for development.
• Following the lead of our businesses in New Zealand, we've begun a pilot in our Australian Personal Insurance business (in August 2007²) to allow some call centre employees to work from home. The 16 employees involved in the pilot have been provided with computer and telephony equipment for their homes and are connected to the call centre network. The group includes some employees who interact with their managers and teams entirely by remote access.
• We've increased parental leave for primary carers from six to 12 weeks, and we're implementing new ways to keep in touch with primary carers whilst they are on leave. These changes were recommended by the IAG Women's Forum, made up of 10 senior women from across the company who discuss issues relating to women in the workplace.
• The Women's Career Development Program has seen six out of the 11 participants progress to more senior roles.
• We've partnered with Swinburne University to develop the Stress Minimisation Program, a program which was launched in August 2007 and is based on the latest techniques in emotional intelligence to help staff anticipate and minimise work and life stress and to understand their personal responses to stressful situations.

These are just some of the ways we are working to attract and retain highly skilled people. There are many others, and some are covered in the case studies were in our online Sustainability Report. We have a long way to go, with differing levels of performance across our business when it comes to effectively managing our people. But we're working hard to address this; we know the investment is worthwhile to build a business that wants to be around for the long term.

¹ Access Economics, Population Ageing and the Economy, January 2001.
² Note that the implementation of this pilot was outside the period covered by this Sustainability Report.

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