Our people, our most important resource

Any leader striving for success will understand that success is achieved through people. When the people in your organisation feel respected and valued they perform at their best. How as leaders do we create the conditions for people to be ‘their best self’? Some of the work that I am most proud of while the Chair and Managing Director of Konica Minolta was the embedding of policies to support our people.

Family & Domestic Violence Policy

Something that I found of value in helping to inform us and also that helped our people understand our motivation for change, was to bring people into the organisation to do talks at lunchtime for our staff, or during a morning tea or whatever, and on one occasion we had somebody visit us who had been a victim of domestic violence.

When this woman talked, I was struck by the inter-relatedness of what she had been going through and her workplace. So, for instance when she would flee the house to get away from her attacker (her intimate partner) she would often head straight to her car, and shelter there. She may not even have the keys with her but at least momentarily she was safe inside the vehicle. However, her abuser would be so outraged and so angry that he would do things like smash the side mirrors or kick a side panel of the car. Apart from the trauma being experienced by this woman one of the other issues was that it was a company vehicle so she would have to go to work the next day and report that damage. Also, often while attacking her he would grab her mobile phone, to make sure she couldn't call anybody for help, and would often also smash that. Again, it was company property, and she would have to report that she had damaged her phone.

So, she'd make up excuses and she would say I'm so sorry, stupid me! I’ve damaged the car again in the car park at the supermarket or whatever or I have dropped my mobile phone again, and then she developed a reputation for being generally careless with company property, but she was just too embarrassed to tell people the truth.

It made me realise that there just needed to be greater awareness inside our own organisation of when certain occurrences inside our firm might be linked to traumatic events going on externally in the lives of our staff. The World Health Organisation 2018 study ‘Violence Against Women’ conducted across 161 countries, found that 1 in 3 women had experienced physical and / or sexual violence by an intimate partner. An Australian Bureau of Statistics study, ‘Personal Safety in Australia’, published in 2017 found 1 in 6 Australian women had been subjected to physical partner violence (and 1 in 17 men). A more recent study by Our Watch indicates that 1 in 4 Australian women (23.0%) has experienced physical or sexual violence by a current or former intimate partner since age 15. Other forms of abuse also exist such as mental, emotional or financial abuse. I realised that as a company of 500 employees (plus people working in contract roles) we were likely to be a representative segment of society, and therefore, must surely have people working with us who were going through these experiences, and we must also have people who were perpetrators of domestic violence.

So, we decided that we would have a number of our staff trained at UNSW. Not to the point of being fully fledged psychologists or counsellors but just to enable them to have a greater degree of empathy and understanding  for the people going through these experiences. We made sure there was at least one person in each branch around Australia and they were people that somebody needing support could go to, outside of their direct manager, or even outside of the HR department and people really appreciated that initiative.

We also decided that we would put in place domestic violence leave so we created two weeks of extra leave on top of sick leave and normal annual leave We also did something which was, and perhaps still is, somewhat controversial. We extended that leave not just the victims but also to perpetrators, that is, people who were perpetrating domestic violence and wanted to stop and wanted to go to counselling during work time. That has been criticised in some quarters. I've even been told we were just providing an incentive that if you're a perpetrator of domestic violence you get extra holidays if you work at Konica Minolta. I thought about this very deeply however, I didn't believe that anybody would come forward with a bogus claim of being a perpetrator of violence toward their family just to get some time off work. That didn't really make sense to me.

Safe@Work

A natural extension of this was to make sure that people working at Konica Minolta were safe within our own workplace. The Australian Human Rights Commission produced a report called Safe@Work which dealt with the high incidents of harassment in the workplace in the form of sexual harassment and bullying and things of that nature. We didn't see evidence of those things taking place but we still didn't think that we would somehow be this perfect workplace where these things weren't happening.

So, we started to talk to all of our staff about ensuring that we respected each other and that as a company we wouldn't tolerate any form of bullying or sexual harassment or discrimination against people on the basis of ethnicity or gender or sexuality or any other reason. I visited every branch and as well as addressing everyone in a ‘town hall’ style meeting, I also met separately with all women in every branch. In a couple of cases we went out to a café, or alternatively just in an internal meeting room, and I asked them to tell me what their experience was working in a male dominated organisation.

From that we realised that one issue was that people just often didn’t realise that their actions were causing others concern. Much of this fitted into what we could call ‘everyday sexism’ such as men getting up at the end of a meeting and walking out leaving their coffee cups behind, probably with the assumption that the women in the meeting would tidy things up. Another occurrence was the telling of a joke that may have seemed funny to most of the group listening, but caused offence to others. We had just started a marketing campaign called ‘Rethink’, as in rethink the way you use technology, so we used this same campaign tag internally to combat harassment.

Parental Leave Policy

A policy that revamped to support our staff was our  parental leave policy. I think at the time the law was 12 weeks maternal leave for the person giving birth and two weeks paternal leave for their partner and we were simply complying with the law at that time.

What we decided to do was get rid of the terms maternal leave and paternal leave and just call everybody parents, and treat them the same, and so we extended 12 weeks leave to both parents. It was extended to people who were adopting and was also drawn down on for still birth. We also made it quite flexible. We felt that we weren't in the best position to tell our people how best to use that leave, that seemed very counter intuitive. We didn't dictate that they had to take it all at once they could take it really whenever they wished. So, the only requirement we had was that they had to use that 12 weeks up within three years of the birth, or the adoption, but they could take it one day a week or they could save it up for a future date or whatever.

When the team that put the policy recommendation together presented to me I asked them “when should we start” and they said well we're ready to go, the policy is written we could announce it and put it on the intranet tomorrow. I said “great thank you for the really good work you've done but what happens if your child was born today” and the answer was well you'd miss out because the policy will only apply from tomorrow.

And so I said well we're trying to motivate our staff and support our staff that just doesn't really sound right to me and somebody said we could bring it back to the 1st of the month and I said yes and “what happens if your child was born on the last day of last month”, and in the end we decided that in the same way that the leave could be taken at any time in the next three years the leave would actually apply to any birth or adoption that had taken place in the last three years. So, it was retrospective on a pro rata basis. Now that didn't apply to many people, but of course those people that it did apply to were extremely appreciative, and for many people that it would never apply to it reconfirmed in their mind that they were working for a company that really cared about its people.  

Changing Societal Attitudes

Now, sometimes people will challenge me around the issue of a company seeking to go beyond legal requirements for staff benefits or seeking to have a social impact along with its normal commercial operations. They’ll say, "David, it's not the job of a company to save the world".  Or “it is not the job of a company to right the wrongs in society or to tackle human rights abuses, that is not why corporations exist. They exist to produce shareholder returns”. That position is called the shareholder primacy argument, and it is a completely valid perspective.

However, l think what people sometimes miss is that society's views are changing, and society is starting to judge companies much more around how they treat their people and their ESG credentials, their environmental, social and governance position on things. And not just consumers but when people are making decisions around who they want to work for. Also, the investment community is demanding positive actions from companies on a range of fronts including that they take action to eliminate human rights abuses and that they care for the well-being of their staff. These characteristics of a company that are perceived as determining whether the company is a good company or not have a direct impact on the company’s financial performance.

When a company does good, the company will do well.