Our people
Using our purpose to create meaning for our people and support our performance
Overview: We are focused on creating a workplace where our people are aligned to and support our purpose and have the skills and capability to respond quickly to the evolving needs of our customers, and the changing nature of work. Our Leading@IAG program provides the system of work to support this throughout IAG. Using our purpose to guide our decisions helps us create a culture where customers can trust that we will deliver on our promise to them, and our people experience meaningful and purposeful work. There have been calls for a broad-based cultural shift within the financial sector and we acknowledge culture is pivotal to ensure we meet community expectations.
Building agility through Leading@IAG
Our Leading@IAG system of work sets clear expectations about the skills and behaviours we expect from our people, at every level of our organisation. Leading@IAG helps our leaders link purpose and strategy to the design of their systems of work and roles, and helps them identify talent and manage people’s performance.Encouraging an effective and engaging culture
The consistency and alignment that flow from Leading@IAG help increase the level of trust within the organisation and contribute to a more engaging, agile and effective culture.
We believe building deeper, more trust-based relationships with each other helps us ensure that our culture supports our business to meet the needs and expectations of our people, our customers and the community.
We want our workplace to be characterised by a greater degree of collaboration, ethical behaviour, diversity in our people and a strong sense of belonging. These cultural aspirations were integral to the design of our new Sydney office in Darling Park. An activity-based working environment helps us work more effectively, so we can better serve our customers.
We monitor our culture using an organisation-wide employee net promoter score that measures advocacy and agility indicators. The advocacy measure reflects how likely people are to recommend IAG as a good place to work. Agility indicators help us understand our people’s experience at IAG and that contributes to innovation, speed and delivery.
This year, our rolling six-monthly employee net promoter score improved from -29 to -2 by 30 June 2018. The negative result reflects a variety of factors, including uncertainty following internal restructures and the subsequent need to embed new structures, roles and ways of working but this is improving. Our goal is to reach +20 by 2020.
We use a culture dashboard to measure shifts in engagement across every team, every two months and our leaders’ annual performance outcomes are linked to these results.
A key contributor to our culture is the extent to which our people feel they belong so we have a specific focus on diversity, inclusion and belonging: greater diversity helps us to be agile and innovative, while greater inclusion increases connection and understanding. We have set targets for key areas, including the percentage of senior management roles held by women, and the percentage of employees who are Indigenous. Our targets and this year’s results are set out on page 19.
Focusing on our people’s safety
Our 2020 Work Health & Safety Strategy prioritises psychological and physical health, flexible and mobile workforces, security and managing emergencies. This year, we focused our efforts on increasing mental health awareness.
We use the internationally-recognised measure of lost time injury frequency rate to measure how we are performing, and our targets and results are set out on page 19. We also review measures that may help us predict future issues. These include use of our Employee Assistance Program; hazard and incident reporting and follow-up; and compliance with the safety and wellbeing training that is compulsory for all new employees, and repeated by all people managers.
Discussion: Preparing our workforce for the future
Workforce design helps us focus on having the right skills, experience and capability now and into the future. Workforce insights and analytics help us anticipate the future demands for skills within our organisation, and consider how technology will affect the ways our customers live, how and where our people prefer to work, and future types of work. We are also gaining greater clarity on the skills that are aligned to our strategic aspirations and our purpose.
These insights are informing our Future ME initiative to help us prepare our people to transition to a new world of work.
We know we must evolve our business if we are to provide exceptional customer experiences in the future. This means the skills and capabilities we require in our people will also continue to change. While technology, automation and global partnering will affect some roles, they will also create new opportunities. Adaptability, cognition, data, digital and design are some of the critical skills we will need to evolve our future workforce.
Our Future ME program incorporates practical steps to help people prepare for the future of work. We are trying to take a proactive approach by building our people’s awareness of the future of work, providing greater clarity on skillsets that are aligned to our strategic objectives and supporting people to develop these capabilities for use either within or outside IAG. We believe Future ME empowers our people to plan ahead and gives them a degree of control over their future.
We also acknowledge we can create greater development opportunities by connecting our people to skilled volunteering with our community partners. We see alignment between the skills being developed through these programs and future of work capabilities and requirements.