Employment & Labour
In 2017 Scentre Group focussed on bringing to life its firm belief that having new employees well-equipped in the organisation at the start of their tenure would ensure they are set up for success, and able to fully contribute to the best of their ability. Accordingly, the focus during the year was on the breadth of our employee experience and specifically attraction, recruitment, ‘onboarding’ and induction and performance management and development.
Attracting and recruiting talent
We continued to grow our online community to attract new talent via an expanded LinkedIn presence, reinforcing key employer brand messages and sharing insights into our culture and careers at Scentre Group. Our LinkedIn efforts have been highly effective with the Group’s engagement – as measured by number of followers – growing by just over 200% between 2015 and 2017.
We’re continuing to refine the recruitment process by seeking feedback from the top three candidates shortlisted for each vacant role, with results showing a Net Promoter Score of 69% – based on ‘your experience’ and ‘how likely are you to recommend Scentre Group to family or friends?’. The Group has nominated a competitive target of 70% for 2018.
During the year we rolled out an induction and orientation program for our recruitment providers, familiarising them with aspects of our business, culture and employee brand that we believe best presents us to potential candidates.
A relaunch of the Scentre Group corporate website also provided an opportunity to update the careers section to align with the corporate brand, employee value proposition and our cultural values as reflected in our DNA.
Onboarding and induction
Our focus was to create a holistic and consistent onboarding and induction offer that covers the first stage of an employee’s life-cycle with the Group, from pre-commencement through to the end of their first 12 months.
The introduction of two new technologies – Page-Up and Enboarder – has significantly improved the new employee journey in these early stages. Through Page-Up, candidates now have electronic access to letters of offer, contract acceptance and input of personal information, expediting the entire process by up to 10 days.
The onboarding process has been enhanced by the Enboarder mobile app, providing new employees with vital knowledge about Scentre Group to facilitate a smooth start to the company and their new role.
Our induction program was redesigned into a customised ‘Day One’ experience held in one of our centres and aimed to further connect new employees with Scentre Group’s ‘big picture’ and provide an overview of our Purpose, DNA and cultural focus on diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the context of how all parts of our business collectively bring these to life.
A new employee’s education continues in their local work environment, with the introduction of several team-based experiences that are all designed to integrate the new employee into the Group, their immediate team and new role.
The increased focus on the onboarding and induction of new employees has already resulted in our turnover in the first three months of employment reduced by 38% from 2016 to 2017 and turnover in the first 12 months of employment reduced by 12% from 2016 to 2017.
Training and development
In 2017 we continued the trend of seeking out ‘on the job’ and coaching experiences for our people to develop their skills in favour of face-to-face training. The small number of training programs still offered amounted to 27 sessions during 2017, on par with the 25 sessions held in 2016.
The major investment made in our employees’ development was in our Inclusive Management Program which we rolled out to all people managers from general manager to team leader level in 2017. In all, 493 people managers attended the program which was designed to reinforce the cultural agenda of D&I as it relates to how managers attract, recruit and bring employees on board.
As a result of this roll out, training hours show a significant increase for the year to a total of 13,628 up from 6,609 in 2016. Training hours for females rose to 6,336 and males to 7,292.
Delivery of the second module of our Inclusive Management Program in 2018 will contribute to embedding the alignment of peoples’ goals to those of their managers. This will be achieved by upskilling our people managers to have effective and meaningful people conversations – from goal-setting, to managing their people, through to recognising and rewarding.
Employee retention
A core lever for people retention, particularly our key talent, is the investment made during the year to stretch and grow their capability and work experiences with us.
The focus in 2017 was on our General Management team and they were incorporated into our leadership development approach with The Alignment Partnership, who partner with leaders to align their organisation’s reality with its aspirations. The 12-month approach includes leadership impact assessments, creation of individual development goals and the execution of balanced leadership scorecards.
With regard to emerging talent, our human resources teams have worked with the business to identify small groups of individuals with potential throughout the organisation. In keeping with the Group’s shift away from ‘one-stop leadership programs’, talent identified within the business participated in a program where they received an individual leadership assessment, debrief and coaching sessions, a mentor chosen from our General Manager ranks, a career plan developed in partnership with their line manager and endorsed by their General Manager and participation in individually tailored training programs designed to help them broaden their business skills.
In 2017 our key talent retention target was >85% and we achieved 98% retention.
Employee engagement
During the year we once again conducted an employee survey to understand our employees’ views on how we have been tracking in aligning individuals to organisational goals, our ability to respond as a company to external pressures, and our peoples’ engagement.
We also sought to understand our peoples’ view on how we tracked against key business initiatives including role clarity and decision making, D&I, safety and security and our organisational efficiency in processes and meetings. These sit alongside core topics that cover our ability to collaborate, manage performance and develop our people.
Overall, 91% of our people completed the survey and we achieved an 88% favourable engagement score, an improvement of 3% since July 2016. This score places Scentre Group in the top 2% of companies globally which puts us in rare company as a place where people are willing to go that extra mile for what we believe is important.
Other areas of the survey where we scored highly were:
- providing a safe and secure workplace – 91% favourable
- providing an environment that enables work/life balance – 86% favourable
- creating a culture that is diverse and inclusive – 84% favourable
- ensuring alignment to our people to our Purpose, DNA and business goals – 82% favourable
- how we’re collaborating to achieve results, a core measure of our DNA values – 79% favourable
- ensuring people are empowered through greater role clarity – 79% favourable
Future initiatives
In 2018 our focus will be on continuing to enhance our leadership capability, acquisition of market best talent,
best in class onboarding for all new team members and continuing to leverage technology to enhance the
employee experience.
Specifically, our goals are:
- leadership and management:
- deliver Inclusive Management Program Framework (IMP 1, IMP 2, IMP Alumni). IMP2 will focus on building capability of our managers to manage, develop and recognise their people by using inclusive conversations.
- source and retain best talent by:
- reviewing and evolving our people planning forums to ensure we have best talent for now and in the future
- reviewing the talent assessment approach, including recruitment and succession to ensure best internal and external talent
- delivering a talent pipeline strategy in line with people planning forums outcomes ensuring targeted development plans for critical talent is in place.
- embed an extraordinary onboarding and induction and experience for all new team members including:
- Enboarder content review and refreshing as needed
- expand Enboarder workflows to include all employment types and relevant change of status
- embed online and team orientation for improved team and role induction.
- leverage technology to provide an extraordinary employee experience including:
- automate and integrate technologies that touch new team members from attraction through to recruitment to onboarding and induction up to the end of the first 12 months
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