Heather Polglase, Spark’s director of people, culture and ways of working. Photo / Supplied
Spark won the 2022 Deloitte Top 200 Diversity and Inclusion Leadership Award on the back of its broad strategic approach to embedding change in the business rather than a specific programme.
The award judges said Spark demonstrates, “real leadership in New Zealand with its comprehensive and highly embedded, employee-led approach across the full spectrum of diversity and inclusion”.
They say the outcomes of this are “impressive” to date and there is “a sophisticated data-driven strategy for further enhancement of outcomes in the years ahead.”
Heather Polglase, Spark’s director of people, culture and ways of working, says the company set off on its current path about six years ago, with an organic, bottom-up approach to diversity where the organisation allowed its people to decide and define what a commitment to inclusion might look like.
This grassroots activity led to the start of Spark’s Blue Heart programme which focused on celebrating cultural differences. Thousands of people made a Blue Heart Pledge, a personal commitment to diversity and inclusion. That programme still runs today.
In 2019 there was a stocktake. “We did the meerkat thing with our eyes up and out, looking at what was happening then and what might eventuate a couple of years on,” explained Polglase. “We looked at what was working well from the Blue Heart movement. Those Blue Heart values and behaviours were integrated into things like our remuneration and performance framework.
“We felt we had done a good job, but we still had big ambitions.
“Women and leadership were a big focus. Another was understanding more about the ethnicity and cultural intelligence that existed in our business and how that might look in terms of talent in the future from a broader New Zealand sense.
“We asked ourselves did we really reflect the communities in which we participate and if we were creating a sustainable future for all these different groups”.
At this point, Spark’s leadership team realised it needed to complement the bottom-up approach.
Polglase says that in the area of its gender goals it had done well when it came to the gender split among senior team members and the company’s board but needed to do more further down in the organisation. That meant working to educate, upskill and set some standards. “Without these goals and providing this data to our leaders, they are probably fumbling around in the dark. So, at this point, it became a data and insight game.”
Spark’s ambition was a 40:40:20 gender balance across the business. That means 40 per cent of men, 40 per cent of women and 20 per cent of any gender — Polglase says this can include non-binary people.
At the same time, it aims to reduce the median gender gap to 18 per cent by 2025. It was 28 per cent when the goal was set in 2019.
Polglase says the company tracks progress on these measures on a quarterly basis. She says settling on specific goals was a pivotal moment.
It’s a structured, data-led approach to embedding diversity and inclusion across the business. Giving leaders data helps them make better decisions. They have targets. Each department now has an action plan to meet its representation goals. At the same time, the company provides specialist support to help leaders, there are practical tools and training to give them the skills to make this work.
Spark is hard-headed about diversity and inclusion. It’s the right thing to do but it’s also smart business.
Polglase says you need to show a credible return on the investment. It doesn’t have to show up as a dollar line, but leaders need to show the outcome of making that move is generating goodness for people, the company, customers and the country.
Above all, it is now an integral part of Spark’s business DNA.
“We’ve taken diversity, equity and inclusion from being a vertical work stream,” said Polglase. “Which is what you have to do when you’re setting it up because you need a place for it to come home to. You need to know you’ve got someone energised and focused on it. The next phase is actually to weave it as a horizontal into how we work and how we show up”.
Finalist: Lion New Zealand
Lion established its Gender Balanced Teams initiative three years ago.
The company was close to gender parity across the entire workforce and had made progress with balancing its leadership, but for women to thrive and for the business to get the full benefits of inclusion it needed to go further and focus on female inclusion at the team level. In practice, the initiative means that any work team in the business with five or more people will include a minimum of 40 per cent representation for both women and men by 2030.
Jacquie Shuker, Lion’s change and culture director, says the journey towards this initiative started more than a decade ago as the wider community became more inclusive. “We looked at our customer base and we knew that the best way to serve them would be if our team members reflected that”.
Today the company’s senior leaders have balanced teams as part of their objectives.
There were important earlier steps on the path to more balanced representation. The company introduced flexible working in 2015 and 2016. Shuker says it was a significant change in the way people worked. Then in 2017, Lion moved to close the gender pay gap.
Between 2018 and 2021 Lion made progress, and female representation across the company climbed from 47.1 per cent to 51.4 per cent. Yet the business recognised women were not so well represented in key functions such as sales and the supply chain.
She says a lot of people understand what a gender-balanced organisation looks like and many organisations target a 50:50 gender balance, but Lion’s approach is more nuanced as it aims for gender-balanced teams. “This makes you break down the biases that might exist within certain functions”.
Shuker adds the company wanted to get a real cut-through with diverse conversations happening in those teams. “It’s productive. The idea is to get to a position where people know they are different from others on the team and that means they need to listen harder to what the others say.
“At the same time, they ask better questions because they are not taking mental shortcuts.”
There are a number of initiatives to speed up progress. Shuker says that Lion’s approach to recruitment has changed — the company now uses a gender-balanced interview panel for new applicants.
There is also capacity building. Lion has built specific programmes to help and support women to prepare for leadership. At the same time policies in areas such as parental leave have been updated.
The award judges praised Lion for its singular focus and tremendous progress on gender diversity which has made a significant impact.
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