Gender Equality Strategic Plan

Gender Equality Strategic Plan: 2021 – 2025

At John Holland we’re up for the challenge of transforming lives. We recognise that gender equality leads to better performance, diversity of thought, improved decision-making, and enhanced team performance. Gender equality also embodies our values of caring, empowering, imaginative, and future-focused.

That’s why we’re committed to becoming an industry leader and being an employer of choice for gender equality. It will allow us to create a stronger business, attract the best people, and provide fantastic opportunities for top talent already within our ranks.

Our goals

Two years since launching our Gender Equality Strategic Plan we’ve reflected on our goals and achievements. We’ve re-aligned our five key aspirational goals to reflect learnings, business changes and respond to external developments such as WGEA Employer of Choice and compliance reporting. We have also reported on our progress against the key goals we wanted to achieve by the end of 2022.

We set out to achieve five key goals by the end 2022

1. Upskill our leaders on the importance of leadership in diversity and inclusion across the employee lifecycle.

We’ll keep embedding the practices set out in these goals so that we can achieve our longer-term aspirational goals.

2. Focus on increasing the pipeline of women joining John Holland.

3. Review recruitment processes to remove bias in our talent programs and succession planning.

4. Assess why our people are leaving John Holland and support on retention.

5. Track progress against participation.

How these changes have been embedded in our ways of working to drive gender equality

- Face to face and e-learning training on breaking bias (3388 employees completed) and workplace behaviour training (2149 employees completed) across our business

- Flexibility training for managers

- With the launch of our capability framework our focus of inclusion, diversity and equity has been captured with the capabilities that set us apart.

- Adopted the 40/40/20 framework across the employee lifecycle

- Continue to build on engagement with schools and universities to support the pipeline of talent

- Analysis of employee exit-data has identified further work to improve employee retention, including an increased focus on flexibility

- Tracking tool launched in 2022 for employees, capturing actions from across the company

- Interactive dashboard that generates monthly data across gender equality indicators

Refreshed goals

We’ve refreshed our five key aspirational goals since 2021, and still aim to achieve them by end 2025:

1. Achieve a minimum target of 40% women in staff roles overall to ensure equal representation of genders across John Holland.

2. Embed targets at leadership levels and job families where women or men are underrepresented, and measure progress.

3. Achieve overall gender pay equity.

4. Ensure flexible ways of working are the norm for everyone.

5. Maintain the WGEA Employer of Choice for Gender Equality citation and lead through our sphere of influence.

We’ll continue to align the goals and the actions as outlined in this strategic plan with the John Holland Inclusion Strategic Plan (2023-2025), WGEA Act (2012) compliance reporting and the WGEA Employer of Choice citation.

The 40/40/20 framework

This framework helps deliver equitable outcomes for men and women by appointing and promoting 40% men and 40% women. The remaining 20% allows flexibility in hiring and promoting people of any gender, taking account of pipeline/labour supply challenges, and making merit-based decisions.

Merit challenge

To be a leading organisation we need to recruit the best people for the job – regardless of gender. Potential conscious and unconscious biases can hold us back when choosing the ‘best’ person for the job, and science confirms that we are drawn to those who think, look and act like us.

This plan therefore focuses on training our leaders in diversity and inclusion to reduce the impact that bias can have on our people processes including performance and reward.

Gender pay gap

Since we developed this strategy the Australian Parliament passed the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill March 2023, which means WGEA will now be publishing gender pay gaps. It’s important to clarify that our goal for achieving overall gender pay equity for this 2025 strategy looks at two dimensions.:

- continuing to monitor equal pay across roles

- monitoring and closing our overall gender pay gap. This means decreasing our 2021-2022 gap of 31.3% by at least 2% by the end of 2025 (for mean total remuneration).

Current gender statistics

Women and men representation in December 2023 compared to August 2021. August

5,554

5,748

How we’re achieving our goals

Actions since the Gender Equality Strategic Plan launched:

- Leadership training and skill development for all managers and People teams to ensure 40/40/20 framework is well understood and supported.

- Strengthening the understanding of belonging, inclusion, diversity and equity (including gender) and zero tolerance of any gender-based, sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying.

- Applying a gender lens (aligned with 40/40/20 framework) to all John Holland talent programs, development opportunities and talent discussions.

- Actively challenging bias during talent review conversations, succession planning, promotions and restructures.

- Visible targets for all business units on gender participation and tracking relevant gender data through dashboards that are accessible to all employees.

- Ensuring gender equality is factored into tender processes.

- Meeting our equal pay obligations through annual reviews and action.

- Embedding flexible working throughout the business, particularly on our projects.

- Focused programs for leaders on the importance of inclusion, diversity and equity, building inclusive behaviours and challenging unconscious biases.

- Running successful annual initiatives such as Women’s Mentoring Program.

- Partnering with high schools, external providers, universities and trade schools to promote a career in construction for women.

- Deeper analysis of why our people are leaving the business and appropriate interventions to address retention issues.

- Embedding additional employee benefits and/or initiatives targeting people with caring responsibilities.

- Ensuring work sites cater to all genders and applying zero tolerance to gender-based harassment, discrimination and bullying and any other negative behaviours.

- Continuing to improve our parental leave policy and better supporting people returning to work.

- Supporting our people who experience family and domestic violence through improved policies, education and awareness.

New actions:

- Annual analysis of our overall gender pay gap (as per WGEA reporting) and clear actions to address.

- Sharing our learnings and knowledge across our industry and sphere of influence.

- Building greater understanding for managers and senior leaders in their roles to support respectful workplace.

Progress to date

- The proportion of women employed by John Holland was 25% in December 2023, up from 21.4% in 2021. For staff roles (not including our frontline workers) the proportion of women was 31% in December 2023 compared to 30.2% in August 2021.

- Achieved the WGEA Employer of Choice citation for 2022-2024.

- Women comprised 46% of our 2023 graduate intake, up from 20% in 2018.

- 18.7% of women at John Holland work in an engineering field in December 2023, up from 8.6% in 2016.

- Developed and continue to embed policies that drive greater inclusion and diversity including: our Working Flexibly Policy, Family & Domestic Violence Policy, Gender Affirmation & Gender Equality Policy.

- Improved our Parental Leave by increasing number of weeks paid leave for primary and secondary carers, paying superannuation on unpaid components of primary carers leave and support for new parents with 15 keep-in-touch days.

- In 2021 we had 7 men take primary carers leave and since the policy change we have seen a steady increase with 45 in 2023. You can read more about that in a 2023 case study here

- Enhanced our university and highschool engagement with a focus on early attraction.

- Launched our Celebrate Women Network in 2020 that continues to have one of our largest employee memberships across all our Employee Resource Groups.

- Launched the Women’s Mentoring Program in 2019, with 175 women participating over the past 3 years.

- Improved identification of potential bias in recruitment by updating the recruitment system and reporting metrics.

- Trialled a Women’s Sponsorship Program with seven participants in 2020 with lessons learnt to support future programs.

- Provided Breaking Bias training through e-learning and virtual face to face sessions for employees and managers.

- Launched our Gender Equality Strategic Plan Tracker and Gender Profile Dashboard available for all employees.

- Continued to make progress lowering our Overall Organisational Wide Gender Pay Gap.

- Provided training to all managers on flexible working so they understand their role in supporting it.

- Launched a partnership with AFLW where players work for John Holland in flexible work models to support them in their careers both on and off the field. At the end of 2023 we had 20 players working for John Holland across a range of roles.

- Finalist in the NAWIC 2023 and 2024 Business Awards for our work in gender equality.

- Seconded an employee to the ACA Culture in Construction Taskforce to look at the overall industry’s approach to wellbeing, diversity, inclusion and flexibility.

- Revised and launched an updated Inclusion Strategic Plan that covers intersectionality and specific ways of working that will support everyone to feel they belong at John Holland.

- Awarded a NSW Government Women in Construction Industry Innovation Program grant for flexible working activations and evaluations across three test projects.

johnholland.com.au

Contact: inclusion@jhg.com.au