OUR
PEOPLE
Ngā Tāngata
OUR
We strive to create a dynamic, purpose-driven organisation that enables and empowers our people to succeed.
As volatile economic headwinds set the tone for FY23, we recognised three critical drivers to equip our people for the challenging year ahead:
- Unlocking productivity and performance through a focus on leadership capability;
- Being the best place to work through learning and career development, employee benefits, and diversity and inclusion; and
- Strengthening and streamlining our health, safety and wellbeing programmes so everyone gets home healthy and safe every day.
A focus on business productivity and performance
Accelerating leadership capability in our store network
In FY23, we set out to boost leadership capability, particularly across our store network, starting with moving our store leadership teams in The Warehouse, Warehouse Stationery and Noel Leeming to agile ways of working. This followed two years of agile experience in our Store Support Office (SSO), showing how agile can empower our teams to operate faster, better adapt to customer needs and work cross-brand and crossfunctionally to deliver at speed.
A focus on business productivity and performance
Our store leaders are a core part of defining business solutions, driving positive outcomes in their stores and regions, and have taken on opportunities to lead initiatives and projects outside of their stores. We’ve also seen an uplift in cross-brand leadership succession and an increase in gender diversity at store and regional leadership with female leaders increasing from 22% in FY22 to 29% in FY23.
Refining our labour operating model
This year, we examined our labour operating model across the business to seek efficiencies where appropriate.
We refined our SSO agile structure to improve our ability to deliver on customer missions, supercharge performance and productivity, and strengthen our focus on operational and financial efficiencies. In line with these changes, we reduced our SSO labour costs, disestablishing 340 roles. While this was a tough decision for our teams and business, it was an important step in enabling us to respond to the challenging retail environment and changing customer priorities.
We standardised leadership and team structures across the Group by expanding our agile ways of working to integrate our teams from TheMarket, Torpedo7, Services, Customer Care, Business Solutions and Logistics (including distribution and fulfilment centre management).
Be the best place to work
Growing our people through learning
We’re proud to offer learning and growth opportunities for our people, spanning from retail and role-based learning, leadership development, future skills training, and transition assistance programmes. Overall, there are around 140,000 hours of learning available to our team members.
Be the best place to work
To support retail education, team members can gain NZQA Retail qualifications through our partnership with ServiceIQ. This year, 23 team members completed or began the certificate programmes covering topics such as service excellence, product knowledge, health and safety on the job, and resilience in a changing industry.
Our The Warehouse Group Scholarship supports those interested in completing vocational qualifications related to a career in retail. A total of 21 team members have been awarded this scholarship since it launched in FY21. In addition, each team member has access to the External Learning Fund, offering up to $2,000 to fund a course or training that supports their personal career development.
In FY23, we expanded our store leadership programmes, with over 41 team members taking part across our brands. We grew our SSO Link Leadership Development Programme, with over 119 current and aspiring leaders enrolled in FY23. We invited 450 leaders business-wide to attend highperformance workshops focused on unlocking personal and team potential.
Team members are encouraged to take control of their own learning by making use of Udemy, our digital learning platform which offers 204,000 digital courses across an array of topics.
Ensuring that our team members understand their role in keeping our customers, business and each other safe is important. Anti-corruption policies have been communicated to all governance body members and team members. In the year ended 30 July 2023, 86.3% of SSO team members and 95.5% of store team members have completed compliance module training.
Overall, we spent approximately 64,000 hours training our team members in FY23, equating to 5.8 hours training per person per year.
Looking after our teams in 2023
We offer our people a variety of employee benefits.
At the start of FY23, we supported our team through COVID-19 with Care Leave so they could take time off and adhere to government regulations without impacting their sick or annual leave entitlements.
This year, we introduced Here for Good Leave, giving team members paid time off to volunteer for groups and organisations that do good for people, our communities and the planet. Being Here for Good is an important part of our DNA – so we’re proud to offer our team the opportunity to lend a helping hand.
We’re pleased to see 79 team members make use of our Parental Leave Policy this year, which offers 26 weeks full pay, topping up the Government’s paid parental leave payments to 100% of a permanent team member’s salary or wage.
Our ongoing wage commitment offers a minimum of $23.58 an hour to employees at The Warehouse and Warehouse Stationery with at least a year’s worth of service, compared to New Zealand’s minimum wage of $22.70 an hour. Noel Leeming sales team members receive a minimum of $22.70 an hour and $23.50 an hour for non-sales roles, while our Torpedo7 sales roles receive an entrylevel wage of $22.70. Sales roles in Torpedo7 and Noel Leeming can earn commission. Currently, 12.7% of our employees are covered by collective agreements.
This year, recruitment slowed as we navigated a tight talent market. The average number of days to fill roles was 38 in FY23, up from 33 in FY22. Despite this, we continued to fill critical roles across the network and through peak recruitment. In the second half of the year, the talent market began to improve, reducing our average number of days to fill roles to 32.
We are pleased that our employee turnover has decreased this year from 28.4% in FY22 to 26.9% in FY23.
Celebrating diversity and inclusion
In FY23, we worked to empower our teams to bring our diversity and inclusion strategy to life by launching four team member-led community groups: Te Ao Māori, Pride, Wāhine (women) Advocates and Neurodiversity. Members are enabled to drive programmes and initiatives that are important to them and help elevate events such as Matariki and Māori Language Week, International Women’s Day and Pride Month. We plan to empower and strengthen these groups in FY24.
Gender equity remains a core focus and we’re pleased to achieve 101% gender pay equity. Female leaders hold 50.0% of senior leadership roles, up from 46.6% in FY22, and the Board comprises 50.0% female directors since August 2022. Refer to the full Diversity and Inclusion Report on page 105 for more diversity and inclusion objectives, initiatives and metrics.
Health, safety and wellbeing (HSW)
The health and safety of our people and customers is top priority, with conversations, reporting and action plans spanning every level of the organisation, from the HSW Board committee, our Leadership Squad and our teams on the shop and distribution centres floors.
Health, safety and wellbeing (HSW)
In FY23, we strengthened and streamlined our training programmes and initiatives to increase health and safety confidence and reduce risk of injury. This reflects our intention to move from a culture of compliance to a culture of care where compliance obligations become second nature.
To enable this, we embedded our health and safety system ecoPortal in 2022 and saw significant improvement in incident reporting, data tracking and team member response to safety huddles.
We maintained our tertiary level of performance under the ACC Accredited Employers’ Partnership Programme, which is the highest level. We also reintroduced our store Health and Safety Champion Programme, recognising individuals for their active role in keeping store environments safe.
Critical risk management
An essential part of our HSW strategy is critical risk management, which monitors and addresses high-risk activities with the potential to result in fatality or a life-altering injury. Our specific focuses continue to be violent and aggressive behaviour (VAB) and traffic management, with their high potential to occur and result in severe consequences.
By year end, 224 VAB incidents had been reported, with one incident escalated to WorkSafe. This increase reflects improved reporting from our team and ongoing increase of VAB incidents across our network and our communities. To mitigate VAB risks, all store team members complete annual Situational Incident Management training covering de-escalation and prevention skills. To compliment our training, we invested $1.8 million this year to strengthen store security measures, particularly within our Noel Leeming stores.
To improve traffic management practices, we introduced a new learning programme across our sites and implemented consistent reviews and management processes through ecoPortal. Only one critical traffic management incident was reported in FY23, down from 11 in FY22.
Eight other critical risk events (previously known as Severity 1 events) were reported this year, significantly down on FY22’s 52 events reported. We’re pleased to see our Lost Time Injuries reduce by 10.9%. Similarly, the Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) was 13.7, down from 14.2 in FY22.
In FY23, Total Recordable Injuries (TRI) increased 21.8% to 470, up from 386 in FY22. The Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR) was higher at 32.8 per million hours worked, based on 14.3 million hours, compared to 24.7 per million hours worked in FY22, based on 15.6 million hours.
This year, same-day injury reporting was 90%, up from 89% in FY22 and on track to reach our target of 96% by FY25. However, incidents closed within 10 days dipped to 87% compared to 90% in FY22. There are no workers who are not employees controlled by the Group for which the organisation is responsible. There were no fatalities in FY23.
Safety assurance reviews
As an ACC Accredited Employer, Safety Assurance Reviews play an integral role in managing our hazards and risks, and ensure best practice and legal requirements are applied across all our sites. In FY23, we conducted 113 reviews, including 11 across our logistics and fulfilment centre locations for the first time. These provide both assurance and valuable insights for us to plan future improvements and identify areas of focus.
Wellbeing
We continue to evolve our wellbeing approach to focus on holistic wellbeing for our teams. FY23 saw us bring more structure to our wellbeing strategy focusing on four key areas: mental, physical, financial and ways of working. Across each pillar, we developed engagement programmes and offered optional learning opportunities to help boost team member wellbeing. We worked closely with our partner Benestar to offer confidential support to our team members, including professional coaching, personal counselling and access to a self-serve Wellness portal.