At GHD, the empowerment and growth of our people across a connected global network is key to delivering client service excellence, through a focus on safety, leadership and development, and an inclusive culture.

Recognising that our people and culture are GHD’s point of difference, we invest in the professional development of our workforce, and provide opportunities for the next generation of leaders.

Empowering our people

• Our core values of Safety, Teamwork, Respect and Integrity are a central part of our culture. They enable us to attract and retain high calibre people, and ensure we deliver a memorable client experience.
• Our leaders aim to lead by example and inspire our people to excel. Together, they champion continuous improvement by challenging traditional practices, embracing innovation and difference, bringing fresh thinking to the table and contributing to the communities around us (see GHD in the Community).
• We actively foster an inclusive organisation that values gender balance, professional and cultural diversity and Indigenous employment as well as flexible working for men and women to balance work and life.
• Our 100 percent employee-owned business involves our people having a vested interest in delivering and caring for clients. Additionally, our flat regionally-focused operational model provides active involvement in shaping the company’s direction, growth and success.

2016 achievements

Engagement

Engaged and empowered people are a fundamental strength of GHD’s organisation and culture. We conduct regular People Surveys globally that seek input on our business.

In the first People Survey conducted in North America following our merged operations, our commitment to clients and conducting work safely are seen as two of our greatest strengths, and engagement levels were pleasingly high. In other regions, APAC and the UK/Middle East have continuing high levels of engagement, and in FY16 Australia showed marked improvement from the previous year in areas of vision, communication, and empowerment.

Talent

Our long-standing commitment to organisational renewal and growth is based on recruiting over 5% of our consulting staff each year as new graduates (200+ per annum).

This continuous renewal achieved by attracting and retaining talented university and college graduates is key to developing GHD’s future leaders.

During the year, we launched a new recruitment campaign ‘my GHD impact’ which features people across the business sharing their work experiences and discussing the real difference they are making to the communities in which we operate. See: www.ghd.com/global/careers/graduates/

Encouragingly, GHD is also achieving greater gender balance in its university and college recruits, with most parts of our business approaching a 40:60 ratio, which is creditable for our industry.

Career opportunities

We offer our people rewarding careers with a wide variety of experiences within their home country and beyond.

Our newly launched Cracking Careers campaign is helping raise awareness of internal job opportunities globally.

We continue to facilitate a mobile workforce to encourage people to seek new challenges across the GHD network of 200+ offices. The introduction of a new migration support service is also resulting in enhanced employee experience for international transfers.

Diversity and Inclusion

This year, we further embedded our award winning diversity and inclusion plan in Australia, and began extending initiatives to all other regions.

Our continued focus on gender diversity has resulted in a marked rise in female leadership appointments in recent years with increases in global, regional and technical executive roles.

We also brought together women from around the globe to identify ways to better retain and attract women to GHD. This exploration has since been extended to a broader cross section of leaders, emerging leaders and university and college graduates.