Our 100 percent employee-owned business means our people have a vested interest in delivering and caring for clients. Additionally, GHD's operational model that supports a connected global environment focussed on supporting our clients and markets provides for our ongoing growth and success.
To achieve this, we focus on the key elements of a great place to work. That is, we aim to create a high performing workplace by embedding organisational behaviours, developing our leaders and investing in our people for today and tomorrow.
GHD maintains a suite of policies which outline minimum requirements for conducting business and the standards to be upheld by all of our people.
Our values of Safety, Teamwork, Respect and Integrity reflect the collective behaviours, values, expectations and attitudes of the company. They reflect ‘the way things are done around here’ and determine how we relate to our clients, both internal and external, and our role as a responsible corporate citizen.
At GHD, we are as diverse as the communities we serve across five continents, and we want our people to feel comfortable to share all aspects of themselves at work. Our commitment to inclusion and diversity is driven by a strong conviction that the mindset and the people practices that create and maintain our diverse and inclusive workplace deliver greater creativity, productivity, wellbeing and belonging across our Enterprise, helping us to make full use of the talents of all of our people.
Embracing diversity of thought, background and experience helps us develop imaginative and responsive solutions for our clients that create lasting community benefit, and our commitment to inclusion and diversity is embodied in our values, our core purpose, and our Make It Real strategy.
Our Board has recently given us the aim of become number 1 in our industry in inclusion and diversity and actions are being stepped up in all areas of the Enterprise, supported by sophisticated tactics, campaigns and stronger accountabilities to ensure progress.
Over the last year, we have continued to build on the great work that is already happening across GHD in gender, generational, indigenous, cultural, LGBTI and physical and mental diversity, including creating new Employee Resource Groups to support Neurodiverse, Hispanic, Veteran, and Asian employees, standardizing the reporting of a range of diversity metrics through our new Global People System, educating our workforce about diversity and inclusion through our new LinkedInLearning portal and through specific team education programs, supporting mentoring and sponsorship initiatives and publicly celebrating diversity throughout the year in a range of countries. We have also continued our reconciliation actions with Indigenous peoples and continue to work with world-renowned experts to learn how to take advantage of the generational diversity in our workplaces.
Our Inclusion and Diversity actions are currently focused in three areas:
Understanding and Transfer - better understanding of what inclusion and diversity means across the Enterprise, including the diverse make-up of our workforce, industry comparisons and how culturally inclusive we are; and transferring knowledge and best practice into GHD, within GHD between our businesses, and outside GHD by telling our story to our clients and to the communities in which we operate.
Leading and Enabling - leading by example from the top and throughout our Enterprise with clear accountability for progress towards inclusion and diversity targets; and enabling the passion, skill and commitment of all of our people to inform and generate the actions we take.
Embedding and Improving - embedding inclusion and diversity in our global policies and key processes and improving the knowledge and skills of all our people so that all of us can act in inclusive ways within our roles.
Tai Hollingsbee
The diversity of our people’s thinking is exemplified by Tai Hollingsbee who first joined GHD in 2010. In 2015 he co-founded a technology company that develops prefabricated, zero carbon, community-built housing for remote regions in Australia and around the world. Tai returned to GHD this year as our National Building Engineering Leader.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, Tai is widely recognised for his work in building physics, sustainability and the application of technology to improve performance outcomes across a diverse range of complex engineering projects. He has led complex, multi-million dollar projects in China, United States, United Kingdom, Africa, Qatar, Canada, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Australia.
Tai is driven to deliver high-performance built environments that strive toward a zero carbon footprint, he says, “Through evidence-based design that goes beyond traditional design approaches, I am passionate about using our breadth of services to help our clients achieve rational, cost-effective buildings that enhance the experience of the people who use them.”
Nipa Basu
With more than 25 years’ experience in transforming data into actionable insights for Fortune 500 companies globally, Nipa Basu is the Global Practice Director of Digital Intelligence at GHD Digital. She has proven expertise in enterprise-wide transformation utilising advanced data management and application of analytics to generate significant revenue from data monetisation.
Prior to joining GHD Digital, Nipa was Chief Analytics Officer with Dun & Bradstreet Inc., driving the success the analytics practice.
A digital insights expert, Nipa is noted by clients and colleagues for her ability to communicate effectively to business and technical audiences alike. Equal part scholar and businesswoman, Nipa received her Ph.D. in economics from the State University of New York at Albany, specialising in econometrics.
Jack Lyons
GHD is an official network partner of the Neurodiversity Hub that supports and provides ongoing opportunities globally for neurodiverse students who may never make it into the workforce due to lack of opportunities, differences in communication skills or other factors.
Jack Lyons has autism spectrum disorder and has been recruited as a participant in the program working from our Melbourne office in Australia. Jack is currently gaining skills in the use of design documentation modelling software which is helping further his passion for 3D modelling. Next year Jack will become part of the 2020 Graduate program.
Our neurodiversity program will soon be expanded into North America in a move to embed a fresh approach to attracting diverse talent, improve the employability of neurodivergent students like Jack and deliver strong technical solutions to our clients.
Sioban Hartwell
Passionate about all things water, Sioban’s career has been truly global having worked on projects across the United Kingdom, Australia, North America and New Zealand.
As Market Leader - Water, New Zealand it is the diversity of the role she enjoys most, “I can be on the west coast of NZ one day working with long term mining clients to solve a specific site issue and the next day sitting in a governance meeting for one of our major water panels”.
A Fellow of Engineering New Zealand, and former President of Water New Zealand, Sioban’s clients regularly call on her experience in water infrastructure, with mine water and urban stormwater being particular focus areas. However, it is the ability to work across regions, and draw on GHD’s diverse pool of talent to support all of GHD’s water teams and clients that she really values, “I feel genuinely connected and supported by the wider global community – while growing and diversifying our business to support our clients in New Zealand.”
As this year has shown, the world continues to change at a remarkable pace and for us to navigate this change requires that we continue investing in the development of our people.
In 2020 we completed the Enterprise rollout of PeopleListening, our chatbot-enabled monthly survey to better understand the experience of our employees. Keeping close to the experience of our employees has enabled us to move quickly during challenging times to address engagement issues and to keep abreast of reactions to pandemic responses in different parts of the world. Throughout the 2020 calendar year we have maintained a strong engagement level at or around 7.3 out of 10, with consistently high ratings on our management of COVID.
In a rapidly changing approach to work and work arrangements, we continued to invest strongly in employee development, upgrading to the LinkedInLearning platform to give our people greater access to key content for self-learning and introducing new career discussion structures and training as part of our myPerformance approach to help ensure that development goals were progressed throughout the year. We also introduced new agile performance check-ins to take advantage of the improved technological capabilities of our new Global People System.
We continued to strengthen our internal talent pipeline, refreshing the content and delivery methodology of all our leadership programs to better connect employees across business in ways that accelerate their leadership journeys and take advantage of Enterprise access to Microsoft Teams and other digital collaboration tools. We introduced standard metrics (including diversity metrics) to help strengthen our talent pipeline, and we further standardized and upgraded our selection processes to take advantage of new digital approaches to assessment and interviewing.
The sustained growth year on year in total shareholder return in FY 19/20 has continued to underpin a strong demand for employee ownership. Driven by our global Principal and Associate model, GHD continues to attract and retain outstanding professionals who are highly motivated to invest and lead and as a result, inspire others to become owners. The global recognition of our owner leaders as Principals and Associates, reinforces the distinctive ‘owners mindset’ culture in which more than 25 percent of people are material owners of the business.
Knowledge sharing across our global network has become more important over the last year and the introduction of virtual collaboration technologies such as Microsoft Teams has enabled us to connect individuals and groups in previously unforeseen ways. We introduced a number of Business- and Enterprise-wide townhalls this year as part of our COVID response and this approach has continued through the launch of other initiatives such as our new Brand and our Make It Real strategy. The virtual delivery of training was stepped up this year including training and onboarding for new starters to GHD, global training on performance check ins and career discussions for managers and various other collaborative workshop and focus group opportunities.
We have connected senior leaders across the Enterprise in regular sessions that have continued past the initial phase of our COVID response to provide a valuable opportunity for leaders to build relationships and to learn from each other. We have also invested significantly in virtualizing our leadership development programs, connecting emerging future leaders from the Pacific West Coast, New Zealand and the Australian East Coast as well as Atlantic East Coast and Europe and Middle East in structured programs. Our Global Executive Development Program has also been virtualized enabling us to take advantage of social learning technologies to not only equip our leaders with high-level strategic skills but to ensure that the skills and learning are immediately embedded in our Enterprise.
Mobility opportunities across countries, disciplines and markets provide career advancement and job enrichment, as well as a multicultural, diverse experience across our globally connected network. Our TalentX program targets high-performing Early Career Professionals (Young Professionals) with 2-4 years' experience and provides opportunities to work across the globe in sister GHD offices for an extended period. Unfortunately due to world-wide travel restrictions, we were forced to cancel the 2020 placements in this program, however we have used the enforced recess to redesign core elements that will take advantage of new ways of working across the Enterprise, and will offer an enhanced experience for participants when the program is available.
