He said that while there is plenty of talk about flexibility, Australian business needed to stop thinking about it in terms of special treatment; rather, companies should see it as an opportunity to differentiate themselves from others in a competitive jobs market.
“Flexibility is part of the employee value proposition and can attract talent to an organisation,” Cairns said.
“We also need to counter the notion that working from home or working outside of the traditional 9-5 day is less productive – let’s start measuring in terms of output and outcomes, not hours in the office, because in my opinion, staff with so-called flexibility ‘privileges’ can be more productive than a traditional 9-5 worker because they are trying to balance multiple commitments at work and at home.
“Finally, we need firm diversity targets, not quotas, and boards and management need to be made accountable.
“One of the greatest things Westpac’s former CEO, Gail Kelly, did was to take diversity as one of her KPIs [key performance indicators] alongside the traditional indicators of performance.
“Her targets trickled down to her direct reports and their direct reports and so the picture began to change.”
For its own part, Origin’s board has set three voluntary diversity targets on which it reports publicly every 12 months: equal average pay for women and men; appoint more women into senior roles; and improving its retention of women in senior roles.
Behind each of these are policies and practices to support our managers to reach these targets, Cairns said.
Last financial year, Origin reduced the average gender pay gap to less than 1% and increased the proportion of women appointed to senior roles by 35.9%, which was the company’s highest result ever.
“Still, like many other companies, we have more work to do,” Cairns said.
This is even more evident across the Australian business scene, whose numbers on gender diversity “remain appalling”, Cairns said.
The chairman said his “lightbulb moment” occurred when he was Lion Nathan CEO; and McKinsey had just published a seminal article on the war for talent comparing the good companies and the underperformers.
It then dawned on him that that focusing on 50% of the gene pool meant missing out on half of the talent.
He noted that just 19% of directors on the boards of ASX 200 companies are female; and men also dominate in management ranks – just 17% of CEOs are women and only 32% of senior managers are women.
The percentage of women in senior management in the top 200 ASX-listed companies has not exceeded 13% for the past decade and 62% of those companies have no female senior executives at all.
“That means 124 of the nation’s 200 biggest public companies have no women in their senior ranks,” Cairns said.
“Women also earn significantly less than men, even though they may be performing the same work. The average male full-time worker earns 19% more than the average full-time female worker.
“The picture is worse when you look at management ranks – according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, with the gap rising to 29% the higher you go.”
Cairns added that while equality of opportunity was “… first and foremost a moral and ethical issue”, the business case was also compelling.
“The return on equity for companies with significant gender equality is 10% higher, earnings before interest and tax is 48% higher and the stock price multiple is 1.7 times,” Cairns said.
“The simple message is [that] a diverse and engaged workforce creates value.”
