CBA lives its diversity values

CBA is recognised as having made one of the most transformational culture changes in Australian corporate history. The bank is also only the second Australian company ever to receive a Catalyst award.

On March 29, CBA’s CEO Ian Narev and its Executive General Manager, Corporate Sustainability Tristan Wills will be guests of honour at the Catalyst awards dinner in the historic Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. The event is being held over two days this year to mark Catalyst’s 50th anniversary and Ms Wills has been asked to present CBA’s winning story to a global audience.
Ms Wills says that to win a Catalyst award, applicants undergo six months of intense scrutiny.  “They really get into the detail and nothing is left unturned,” she says.

The award recognises “innovative” organisations that use “proven, measureable” ways to advance women in their organisation.
About 60 per cent of the Commonwealth Bank’s workforce is female and women currently hold 30 per cent of the bank’s leadership roles. As part of its Opening the Door for Gender Diversity program, CBA wants 35 per cent of its leadership roles held by women by 2014.
CBA believes gender diversity at a leadership level makes good business sense. The bank wants to hire and promote from the best and widest talent pool and that must include women. It also wants a leadership team that reflects the gender diversity of its customers to provide the best service it can.

If having women fill 35 per cent of its leadership roles doesn’t sound like a big deal then think again. The last Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency’s Census on female leadership found most of corporate Australia going backwards. Held every two years, the 2010 census of Australia’s top 200 publicly listed companies found only 8 per cent of key executive roles were filled by women. Only 2.5 per cent of the top 200 had a female chair and 8.4 per cent female board members (127 seats out of 1467 seats). The percentage of companies with no women on their boards increased from 51 per cent in 2008 to 54 per cent in 2010. Former CEO Ralph Norris was the bank’s first champion of change and he passed the baton to Ian Narev when he was appointed CEO last December. Mr Narev had been part of the diversity effort since he joined the bank in a senior role in 2007.

“As an organisation, if you don’t have dedicated leadership starting with the CEO then you will not succeed in creating real change,” says Ms Wills.
“[As the CEO] one individual’s words and example can influence thousands of people.”
However, change does not come easily and the first step was recognising the culture that existed using “very in depth” studies at the end of 2003 and 2004.

“The culture was very hierarchical and siloed at the start,” recalls Ms Wills. “When describing the culture people used words like ‘political’ and ‘long hours’.

“We asked, ‘what do you want [the work culture] to look like?’ we learned that we were essentially looking for a culture where people could be themselves and do their best every day.”

The transformation process included training in “unconscious bias” for senior managers.

Developed in the mid-90s, tests were created to help even those who believed they did not discriminate understand hidden biases they held. Giving preference to a dominant group – whether that is along gender, age or ethnic grounds – is a common sort of bias. Scientists have proven that there is a link between the bias scores of a person and their daily behaviour.

“When we say [to senior managers], ‘we are going to put you through an unconscious bias program’ most people say ‘bring it on’ but some say ‘but I don’t have a bias, I find it offensive’.”

“When you are changing mindsets it is very confronting. It is the hardest thing you can do.”

“By holding a mirror up to people you help raise their awareness about things they might unwise be unconscious of.

“When we talk about diversity change we have to talk about it terms of culture. How do we do things around here?”

The bank looked not only at how their employees were meeting their goals (or key performance indicators or KPIs) but also the behaviours they deployed while doing so.

As part of the change, employees were given KPIs around behaviour and senior employees had additional KPIs around “how they grow talent”.

“There are real fairness and equity questions in [exploring diversity]. You will know very quickly [when training] whether you have a good leader or someone who needs a bit of help or even someone who shouldn’t be there.”

Ms Wills says that when staff were surveyed two years ago they used words such as ‘caring’, ‘collaborative’ and ‘customer focused’ to describe their workplace.

She says that while the bank is working to achieve diversity across the board including age and disability, organisation’s must “get decent representation of the most obvious indicator of diversity” women if they are serious about creating a great place to work.

“What you have to be careful of is you want to get excited about the hygiene factors – paid parents leave, pay equity – that is just part of an excellent diversity practice.

“The fundamental shifts come from actually increasing diversity not just maintaining it with hygiene …a blackberry doesn’t equal flexibility.”

For example, the proportion of bank employees working flexibility increased from 35 per cent in 2008 to 41 per cent in 2011. Men account for 36 per cent of those taking up flexible options.

CBA’s other innovations include:

* Being the first financial services organisation to set public gender diversity targets for senior leadership.

* Creating a remuneration team to monitor and support pay equity.

* Setting up a business-unit specific Maternity Leave Register that offers women on leave the opportunity to apply for new opportunities.

* Creating flexibility options such as telecommuting, part-time work, and job share. The bank is also creating workspaces that better support flexibility.

* Mapping employee engagement to customer engagement to document how these have correlated over time. Happy staff equals happy customers.

* Introducing mandatory unconscious bias training for senior managers.

* Reporting employee engagement scores to its shareholders every year.

* Sponsoring the chair of Professor of Finance Renee Adams at the Australian School of Business whose published works include the business impact of having women on boards.