GHD
Annual Review 2019

We are building a more resilient, sustainable and digitally enabled global organisation. With that opportunity comes genuine gratitude in the chance to better support the complex and changing demands of the communities and clients we serve.

Our purpose of lasting community benefit helps us address the most fundamental human needs for water, energy and urbanisation and their interface with the signature forces of our time – accelerating technology, innovation and climate change. Our commitment to deep technical excellence, value creation and our ability to adapt our service offering is making a difference to how GHD is operating globally.

GHD is committed to making the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and its principles part of our strategy, culture and day-to-day operations. We remain strongly committed to alignment with the UNGC 10 Principles and the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular those we believe are most strongly aligned with our enterprise activities, namely Clean Water and Sanitation, Affordable and Clean Energy, Industry Innovation and Infrastructure and Sustainable Cities and Communities.

GHD’s focus on improving safety communication with our people, targeting high risk work groups and senior management engagement has resulted in a strong improvement in our Total Recordable Incident Rate (200,000 hours) - reducing from 0.24 in 2018 to 0.21 in 2019. We remain focused on safety initiatives and further improvements in incident rates during 2020.

GHD is committed to diversity and inclusion (D & I) and the deep strategic value it brings. This year, we established a Global Diversity Council to uncover, understand and help reduce the barriers to broader diversity and inclusion at GHD. Our ongoing strategy for D & I continues with a key objective to close the gap to achieve our gender diversity target of 40 percent female workforce by 2020 including 30 percent for professional/technical roles. Our progress is reflected in the increasing number of female leaders within the business, with 57% of executive appointments being female. In 2019, we also initiated a pilot neurodiversity employment program to attract more diverse talent to GHD.

Boosted by a willingness to adapt, to anticipate new market environments and respond to our clients’ evolving needs, we are shaping a new strategic approach. The unprecedented momentum for a transition to a cleaner energy future globally is providing us with a unique opportunity to take a lead position in future energy, including solar, wind, battery storage, hydro power and storage, waste to energy and hydrogen fuel development.

In a data-driven world, we are shaping our own future in the design of a new agile business strategy that is truly client-centric and adaptive to changing the global markets before us. Our clients are also facing new challenges and requiring new services as they adopt and embrace technology. This strategic approach will allow us to deepen our emphasis on existing focus areas and more positively influence the communities we work within, in a more sustainable manner.

Digital engineering or delivery transformation, is enabling our people to work differently with processes, create new value and think differently about the problems they are solving. Our pioneering efforts in the digital transformation of project delivery and other pursuits have been demonstrated at international conferences like Bentley Systems’ Year in Infrastructure Conference in Singapore and Autodesk University in London.

Revenues for 2019 financial year grew to AUD 2.2 billion, representing an increase of 14 percent on the prior year, which was almost entirely attributed to organic growth. All geographic operating regions; Australia, Asia Pacific, Europe/Middle East and North America delivered positive revenue growth on the prior year. Growth in the new global Digital and Advisory businesses was also very strong with these businesses reaching a combined workforce of around 500 by year-end.

Our strategic commitment is to continue to be client and community obsessed, be courageous, be future ready and deliberate in serving our clients more effectively in the years to come.