Inclusion, Diversity and Workplace Culture

Investor roundtable

31 March 2022

Opening remarks

MIKE HENRY (BHP)

Welcome everyone. I'm joined today by Fiona Vines who's BHP's head of Inclusion and Diversity, as well as by Maria Joyce. Maria is my Chief of Staff who I also asked last year to lead the Project Management Office co-ordinating our global efforts to eliminate sexual assault and sexual harassment at BHP.

In the wake of the Rio Tinto report into sexual assault and sexual harassment, which also covered other issues such as racism and bullying, a number of shareholders have reached out to us expressing interest in BHP's actions in the same regard. Now, we've previously recognised that we had these behaviours occurring within BHP a number of years ago. In fact, one of my very first, if not the first video that I made as incoming CEO back at the start of 2020, was specifically about eliminating sexual assault and sexual harassment at BHP.

Now, we've had concerted efforts underway for a number of years now to eliminate these behaviours, so we won't be undertaking a real-life review, but we did think it was appropriate to arrange this roundtable to discuss where we're at on our journey and the actions that we have underway. I'm going to make some introductory comments and then we'll move to questions and answers.

Of course, one only has to pick up the papers today to know that the scourge of sexual assault and sexual harassment is widespread, as are the workplace issues associated with racism and bullying. So we would definitely welcome any insights you can provide into the actions being taken in your respective organisations that we might learn and improve from.

BHP is committed to an inclusive and diverse workforce and in 2016 - six years ago - we committed to achieving a gender balanced workforce by 2025, and this was a very big step in our industry as many of you will remember. And we've taken significant action and we've made marked progress since, with the near doubling of women in the BHP workforce. My leadership team is balanced, over half female in fact, and we've increased participation at every level of BHP, two-down through to entry level.

Now, we know that an inclusive and diverse workforce is safer, more engaged and more productive. We know from our work that making our workforce more diverse and making it more respectful and inclusive, need to go hand in hand. For the workforce to become more diverse it has to be more respectful and inclusive, for it to be more respectful and inclusive it has to be more diverse. I go as far as to say one can't be achieved without the other. We still have more work to do, and we continue to improve, but we have come a very long way in a relatively short period of time.

In 2018, the Australian Workplace Survey Report was published. It indicated that 70% of women in the mining industry had experienced some form of sexual harassment. We accepted that. We accepted it as true for our industry and for our company globally. We undertook a further review into specific drivers and what needed to be done to address this at BHP, and that underpinned discussions between management and the Board, and determined a follow-on program of actions, this was in 2018.

You can see these actions set out in detail in the submission that we made last year to the WA inquiry on sexual harassment in the mining industry. Our actions have included:

  • the launch of a Global Respectful Behaviours Campaign in 2018. We're now in our third wave of this campaign, and building on the successes and lessons we continue to improve.

  • In 2019 we formally defined sexual harassment as a health and safety risk and we began applying the same level of rigour and focus as we do with any other health and safety issue, and you'll all be aware of just how important health and safety are held by BHP in the mining industry. We established an independent Ethics and Compliance Investigations Unit within BHP in 2019, and within that unit, sexual assault and harassment have been defined as the highest priority category of incidents for investigation and along with that we've made racism a similar classification more recently. In all of our investigations we adopt a victim-centric approach. We've conducted an internal diversity and inclusion review and we've identified measures to upgrade safety and security at our village or camp facilities. We've committed AU$500 million to improve village security across our Minerals Australia villages, this includes the announcement of $300 million across our Western Australia accommodation villages in June 2021 and most of the works will be completed within this financial year. We've provided sexual harassment prevention training to BHP leaders in setting clear expectations of appropriate conduct and driving a more consistent set of discipline outcomes.

  • In the first half of last year, we established a specialised support service to enable anyone impacted by sexual harassment, or who is supporting someone who's been impacted directly by sexual harassment, to connect with a dedicated case co-ordinator who can guide them to obtain appropriate support and resolution. It provides confidential 24-hour service in both English and Spanish; it's a global-wide service. For a number of years we've had executive leadership and company-wide performance criteria linked to remuneration that includes progress towards greater inclusion, diversity and gender representation. Our financial year '22 executive leadership and company-wide performance criteria also includes progress of work to enhance our approach to sexual assault and sexual harassment. In fact, last financial year executive remuneration was adjusted downwards in relation to sexual assault and sexual harassment, acknowledging that we still have much further work to do. We continue to work with a range of industry peers and we've commissioned external experts along the way in relation to best practice controls.

While I'd say that we're more advanced on addressing sexual assault and sexual harassment, we've recently increased our actions to eliminate racism across BHP as well.

As I mentioned, racism has been placed in the highest priority investigation category. I've also appointed Vandita Pant, our Chief Commercial Officer, to support me and the rest of the management team in sponsoring a company-wide effort to better understand, identify and eliminate racism.

Vandita has met with the Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner and we have listening sessions underway across the company globally to raise awareness and increase understanding of the workforce's perspective of racism. We have recently commenced a review of our racism reporting and investigation processes in Australia.

Overall, I'm confident that we're making progress and some specifics that I would call out would be, our ongoing efforts to create a more inclusive and diverse culture being unwavering, and they're paying dividends in terms of performance. I'll come back to that a bit later.

We've improved female participation in the BHP workforce from 17% to 31% since setting that target back in 2016. We have a gender balanced executive leadership team and it's one with a number of people of colour and diverse ethnicity. We've reduced female turnover. The gap between male turnover in the workforce and female turnover in the workforce used to be 8%, female turnover being 8 percentage points higher than male. That's reduced down to 1%, so it's almost even now.

We have raised the proportion of our employees, including those in leadership positions, from First Nations backgrounds in Australia, Chile and our Jansen potash project in Canada.

We've increased our focus on Indigenous and First Nation employment and cultural awareness, including tackling racism and discrimination amongst under-represented groups. We've instituted pay equity reviews for women and we've closed gaps for 8000 in the past two years at a cost, I think from memory, it was around $19 million.

We've recently piloted this same approach on the base of race and ethnicity in the US and are in the process of rolling this out globally. We've made addressing these issues a priority, and we do that through leadership engagement and specifically through our scorecards and remuneration. This includes not just for the senior team, but for the whole company.

Notwithstanding all of this effort and the substantial progress that we've made, we know we still have much further to go. Unacceptable behaviours continue to occur in BHP, and they shouldn't. Our aim is to have a workforce that is free from any form of harassment, racial discrimination, vilification or bullying. We're committed to lifting both our performance and that of the industry, and of course we'll take every opportunity to learn from others.

Now, in respect of the Rio report, I have personally been through every one of the recommendations in the report and my team has done a more fulsome reconciliation. I can say with confidence, that almost all of the recommendations in there have been addressed by the actions we have already taken or have underway, but we have identified a few opportunities for improvement, and one example would be our 24/7 support service. This was the support service that we put in place in the first half of last year.

Elizabeth Broderick has recommended something similar for Rio, but she's called for it to cover not just sexual assault and harassment, but also racism and bullying. Of course, we're stepping back to consider whether and how to expand ours to cover other issues like these.

Now, one other point I wanted to make, and I mentioned it earlier, is that as we have brought focus to bear on eliminating these behaviours in BHP and creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce and workplace, our performance has improved, and that's across safety, reliability of production, and productivity. We shouldn't be surprised, but it's still nice to have the further validation of what we all knew coming into this. But you still see some people out there who would call that into question.

I think we have demonstrated quite clearly the power of creating a more inclusive and diverse workplace and workforce and stamping out some of these abhorrent behaviours, it does translate through to the bottom line as well.

We're now going to open the lines for Q&A - to the extent we can make this a two-way conversation I think that would be great. I'm interested, I know Fiona and Maria are interested, in the steps that your organisations have taken in terms of setting standards, education, investigations and support in this area because we know that we can learn from others.

Questions and answers

ALISON EWINGS (REGNAN)

Thanks very much for the update. I think obviously we welcome specific attention to these issues. One thing I did note about the Rio report is it is quite narrowly framed, and I was interested in what other cultural analysis you've been undertaking to ensure that you've identified all of the potential barriers that might be in the way of successfully addressing this issue, that sit outside that quite narrow framing around the specifics with the Rio report, for instance.

MIKE HENRY (BHP)

I might ask Fiona to elaborate on this but first of all I would acknowledge that we are on a journey here, and we are by no means claiming that we've got it licked or that we fully understand what needs to be done, but we're constantly looking to review and improve. Now, as I said up front, racism, I see us as being earlier in the journey than on sexual assault and sexual harassment.

On sexual assault and sexual harassment we have pretty much ongoing reviews, where back in 2018 we conducted one review, set up a series of actions, and we've had further reviews since. We continue to bring in external experts to provide us with a broader and richer perspective on the problems at hand, what gives rise to these behaviours, and how to prevent them. Every single time we do so, we learn something.

I expect it's going to be exactly the same when it comes to racism. But of course, it's also not about just sexual assault, sexual harassment, and racism. It also comes to sexual orientation and a range of other cultural matters, that actually stem from discrimination, or they can just be poor culture, and this comes back to things like bullying which we've also had a very strong focus on.

So, long way of saying we start off with one understanding of the issue, we identify a series of actions, but one of the things that we always institute around these matters is an ongoing plan to check in at cycles, that sees us bring in experts or use internal means to deepen our understanding and identify further improvements.

Fiona, was there anything else you would like to add?

FIONA VINES (BHP)

Sure. Thanks, Mike. I think perhaps what I would add to that is we've also taken steps to understand the drivers of this kind of behaviour. We know that an imbalance of gender, so having a very homogenous workforce creates the conditions for this kind of sexual harassment, but also other types of disrespectful behaviours to occur, because they essentially create power imbalances in the workplace. We've done a lot of work to understand those drivers and to really connect this work back to our gender balance aspiration, because we believe that gender-balanced teams are the best protective mechanism against this kind of conduct.

The other thing that I would add is we're also thinking a lot about how to take longer-term action to support folks who have experienced this kind of behaviour, this kind of conduct in our organisation. It's one thing to respond well when someone tells us that this has happened to them, and that's something that we've been very, very focused on, but one thing that we're really turning our attention to is how can we ensure that people can thrive in their careers and in their lives post these kinds of quite traumatic events.

ALISON EWINGS (REGNAN)

Great point. I've got a second question. As you point out, BHP has a fairly ambitious gender target in place and it was great to hear you point out the role of both diversity and inclusion needing to work in concert together for those to be successful.

I was interested to what extent you're monitoring inclusion, and particularly any potential negative responses from I guess what you could classify as more of the incumbent workforce, because obviously these sorts of changes can be difficult to manage through and to what extent you're monitoring the response of the existing workforce and the kinds of things that that might give rise to. I'm thinking about in particular the Powers unfair dismissal case as an example of that.

This is an excerpt of the original content. To continue reading it, access the original document here.

Attachments

  • Original Link
  • Original Document
  • Permalink

Disclaimer

BHP Group Limited published this content on 21 April 2022 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 21 April 2022 11:04:02 UTC.