'We believe that a diverse workforce is a high-performance workforce'
Genesis Energy has been awarded the YWCA’s GenderTick, an independently accredited certification that rewards New Zealand organisations that have made a commitment to Gender Equality in the workplace.
The company had to meet stringent criteria across five key indicators to earn the tick, including gender inclusive culture, flexibility and leave, women in leadership, gender pay equality and ensuring a safe workplace.
Nicola Richardson, Executive General Manager, People and Culture, Genesis, said the company are proud to receive this accreditation and have worked hard to be strong advocates for diversity and inclusion as part of our wider company strategy.
“This strategic focus has seen Genesis increase its female leadership to 40%, the wider workforce to 44%, and three of our eight board members are female.”
As a member of Global Women, Genesis is committed to its 40:40:20 diversity goal (40% male, 40% female, 20% either gender) across the entire workforce.
“We believe that a diverse workforce is a high-performance workforce. It is vital to bringing fresh perspectives to decision-making and developing the innovative solutions our customers demand,” said Richardson.
“This is about more than performance metrics, it’s about creating a happy and inclusive culture, which helps attract the best talent and retain the stars we already have.”
Over the past 18 months, Genesis has launched a number of health and wellbeing programmes to further boost its gender and ethnic representation.
Flexible working practises have been introduced to allow all employees to balance work / life commitments, and the company has introduced its Minding the Gap policy to enable fairness and gender pay equity.
The pay gap between men and women doing the same or comparable work is 1.6%. Genesis has implemented systemic changes and reviews to ensure this pay gap continues to narrow into the future.
Other programmes, such as Genesis’ parental leave offering now boasts a 100% retention rate for those who have completed it, and in FY19 Genesis also took the lead in ending the industry practice of asking new hires for their previous salary details.
This removes bias and the possibility of ‘importing’ pay gaps from other organisations, which disproportionately affected women and minorities.
