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Equipping our people with the tools and skills to lead and drive high performance is central to building a culture where our employees are engaged, excel at their jobs, and enable our goals to be achieved.
Employee engagement measures the degree to which employees are emotionally connected and committed to the company they work for. It is a core metric by which we measure the health and success of our organisation, in the same way as other metrics such as revenue, total shareholder return, EBIT or cashflow. The degree to which employees are engaged can typically be influenced by a number of differing factors, for example, whether or not they believe they have opportunities for career development, or whether they have the tools and resources to be able to do their jobs.
AGL undertakes an annual AGL Engagement Survey to give us an understanding of how engaged employees are by measuring key drivers that are important to them such as employment experience, career opportunities, company reputation, resources, performance management and diversity.
The AGL Engagement Survey is administered by Hewitt, an external and independent provider, and all responses are confidential.
The 2008/09 survey was conducted in June 2009 with an overall response rate of 86%, an increase of 2% over the response rate in 2007/08.
We set a target to increase engagement by 10% compared to 2007/08. We exceeded this target with an increase of 12%. This improvement is a result of our hard work to improve the basics of how we work together and manage the business.
The higher engagement becomes in an organisation, the more challenging it is to achieve incremental increases year on year. Our target is a further 7% increase engagement in the 2009/10 engagement survey.
We will continue to measure engagement and focus our initiatives towards our goal of becoming a ‘best employer’ (as defined by Hewitt).
Being a best employer will enable us to be more effective in attracting and retaining the best talent. Our employment value proposition is based on our ability to offer an environment where employees are highly engaged, which in turn will allow us to draw from the most talented people in the market.
An organisation’s values are the building blocks of a constructive culture. The AGL values are the framework for delivering our brand promise – Actions, not words. Living our values assists in shaping the experience that our stakeholders have with our brand, and makes AGL a better place to work.
To help our employees live our values, we have developed a Value Dilemmas workshop that will be delivered to all AGL employees throughout 2009 and 2010. The workshop is designed to give employees the skill, confidence and licence to live the values. The values workshops will be a core AGL program to complement the values module in our Welcome Day for new employees.
An on-line learning initiative was launched this year. Self paced on-line training is available for all employees. As more training courses are added during 2009/10, leaders will be able to create individual learning profiles for their teams to match the requirements of the employee’s role and their individual development needs.
On-line learning provides AGL employees with easy to use training and development programs and in particular provides the platform for AGL’s compliance and induction training requirements, such as Code of Conduct, Information Security, Trade Practices, Privacy and Equal Employment Opportunity training.
Effective employee communications helps to connect our people with business goals and strategies as well as helping to build engagement, pride, community and commitment. During 2008/09 an employee communications strategy was developed as well as a toolkit to assist leaders to build on their communication skills.
The Senior Leadership Group forum was introduced this year to increase connection and commitment to, as well as shared ownership for, the strategy and direction of AGL among our top 65 leaders. It also provides a forum to inform and update leaders across the business about the key priorities, projects and issues of each business group.
Employee road shows were presented at all sites in September, March and April. Hosted by a senior executive, these forums serve to update employees on AGL’s strategic priorities.
CEO round table events have also continued during 2008/09, with more than 76 employees participating in eight events over the year. These events provide selected employees with the opportunity to discuss current projects and highlight any concerns or suggestions directly with the CEO.
During 2008/09 we reviewed and revised our human resources metrics (now referred to as People Metrics) to enable AGL to collect valuable and reliable data to better understand the profile of our employees. We developed a new process for collecting data from non payroll (not in core payroll system) sites. In particular, the process for collecting data from companies AGL has acquired (which use different reporting and payroll systems) has been improved so that all the data is collated centrally. This has resulted in more reliable reporting of statistics.
We have also enhanced our standard People Metrics Reports to include additional key performance indicators and have made this information more accessible, by extending the monthly distribution of these reports to the Senior Leadership Group (our top 65 leaders) for their review and action.
We will continue to develop our people metrics and reporting capability over the next year.
