In July 2009 Insync Surveys, a customer, board and employee survey provider, in conjunction with WA Business News, announced the inaugural winners of the 2009 Best Employer Awards in Western Australia.
Over 350 business leaders attended the awards ceremony, held at the Hyatt Regency Perth. The Best Employer Awards recognised WA employers who are performing well in areas that are critical for their employer brand. Insync Surveys conducted the research, which included feedback from 2,169 employees.
Taking out the Best Employer in the large category (for organisations with more than 200 employees) was Georgiou , a company that delivers projects in civil engineering, building, infrastructure, mining services and precast manufacturing.
The common theme for all winners was the dedication shown towards attraction and retention. Job security emerged as the top attraction driver for WA employees with less than six months under their belt.
"As a standout organisation, Georgiou is not only managing to assure staff of their job security in tough economic times, they're excelling," said Tracie Dawson, Insync Surveys' WA practice leader.
Hard-won accolade
The driving force behind Georgiou's award and the company's people strategy has been organisational development manager Robyn Ivankovich. With an extensive career in training and development and generalist HR roles in the finance and retail industries over the past 20 years, the Best Employer award is an added bonus for Ivankovich - but she is quick to credit all employees of Georgiou Group.
"We were keen to get acknowledgement for the progress we've made as a company through the last couple of years," she says. "We thought it was appropriate given that our own internal survey results were coming out very strong. We had extremely strong advocacy from our people and we thought it would be nice formal recognition for the way the business is being run."
There was even closer alignment with the company's 'new-look' brand and vision. For many years Georgiou's corporate vision was to be the contractor of choice in the civil construction industry. After review and feedback from employees, this has been updated. The company vision is now to be "the best people to work with" which relates internally for our employees as well as externally with our clients and industry partners.
"When we first launched the vision, some people questioned whether we should make that claim.' Now we can, with some confidence," Ivankovich says.
Although Ivankovich makes the rebranding and values relaunch sound easy, it was far from a walk in the park. As a people and change exercise it was a significant undertaking.
"It was initially driven by the executive team - and rightly so I think - as there was a recognised gap in terms of what our clients were seeing as the company was growing and what our needs as a company were. We needed to lift our employer profile, ensure we were attracting better candidates, while keeping the good people. We also needed to appeal to a broader range of clients and bring existing clients with us. We wanted to retain elements of the old brand as well because we are extremely proud of where we've come from as a company. People were proud of the old logo, and even the mention of changing it was quite emotional," she explains.
The answer was to engage the company's 400 employees throughout the process. Georgiou undertook internal surveys, its business leaders talked about the values of the company and where they saw the company going, employees were asked their thoughts on the direction, and checks were made against the company's values. Employees were then asked to vote on their desired values, which transpired as safety, teamwork, excellence and pride. "I managed to get an acronym, which helps," laughs Ivankovich. "The top two values voted by staff were safety and teamwork, and the excellence and pride came out of consultation with senior executives, managers and the marketing company in terms of feedback from clients."
Rapid growth
Georgiou, which commenced operations in 1977 as Direct Drainage, remains a family run company. Founder Peter Georgiou still gets out on site every day and son John Georgiou is the current CEO. Although the company is not publicly listed, it does have a board of directors, which was set up by John so that the company could have the same rigour, structure and due diligence as a public company.
"We've been growing at around 30% every year for the past four or five years - and that's people as well as revenue and scope and scale of projects. The scope of projects is phenomenal in terms of where we were five years ago. Where the base of the company used to be infrastructure, land sub-division type of work, we're now getting involved in more complex wharf projects, desalination projects - the more technical engineering side of things. This was a conscious decision. We wanted to have a bit of insurance and not have all eggs in one basket," Ivankovich explains.
It has also positioned the company well for the ups and downs of the economy. Although it's true to say the fortunes of Georgiou have risen with the fortunes of the WA economy, the same cannot be said for the recent dip in the state's fortunes; the company has held its own. "We put the work in to ensure we would be financially stable enough to withstand any dips," says Ivankovich. "We've come through this better than many of our competitors. We've not had to go down the path of redundancies or anything like that, so from an HR perspective in this industry, it's a massive relief."
Although the company has managed to avoid redundancies, Ivankovich acknowledges they've had to be "responsible" with budgets and also instigate a recruitment freeze. "A recruitment freeze sounds bizarre given that we have 160 vacancies. But most of those vacancies are project related vacancies, so we have jobs that we need to put people on. What we have put a freeze on is overhead recruitment spending. The push to recruit so many people and not having the resources in place to be able to do it makes it very difficult. We will need to review the internal service we provide to our clients - our internal departments - and work out what a good level of overhead spend is based on what the requirements of the company are."
Given the company's solid financial performance, Ivankovich does not believe such a review will be a tough sell. It also appears the company's leaders 'get' the value of HR budgeting. "Even from the training side of things it can be easy for executives to say 'we just won't do that, we'll cut training, or we won't do leadership development'. But I think you lose something in your company if you do that. It becomes just a functional place, not a place that people want to come and work in. The first thing employees will say is, 'my mate down the road is off doing this course so I'll go work for them'. It's part of the retention strategy, to give people the opportunity to develop if they want to," she says.
L&D focus
Although Ivankovich's role covers all HR functions - recruitment, graduate development, IR, culture and change management - she has a special passion for L&D. Her industry and the structure of the company present special challenges. "The hard thing is to get away from the project management way of thinking where it's just about getting the job done. Sometimes it can be very bottom line focused and we need to lift the project managers out of that space and say 'let's think about this from a people point of view - if you want to keep your good teams together let's talk about their development and their skills'," she says.
Georgiou is increasingly directly employing the people who work on projects, rather than sub-contracting. "We see value in making them feel part of the company and not just a resource that gets hired in and out. If we do have people working on a project we try to work together and see where these people could be used next. Rather than hiring a new workforce we try to re-utilise them across other projects," she notes.
Given that shift in employee engagement, there is a strong emphasis on cross-skilling and up-skilling. The majority of training comes under the banner of safety training - primarily ensuring employees have the capability and competency to operate machinery and equipment safely. However, Ivankovich notes the industry is also becoming increasingly focused on the leadership and management capabilities of workers. The Building and Construction Industry Training Fund, which is contributed to by all players in the industry, helps to subsidise these skill building initiatives. "It's an excellent idea - it makes the training affordable but also promotes it in the industry," she says.
She also notes that with a wide ranging workforce, including everything from onsite labourers to project managers, the training needs of employees also had to be closely monitored. Ivankovich and her HR colleagues carefully assess what level of leadership capability or specific skills are required for each job role. "When we first thought about it, we assumed that a person who works as a technical officer or estimator probably doesn't have the same level of responsibility around safety as a person who works onsite. Then we questioned exactly what that meant. Just because they are not in the field does it mean they have any less responsibility for safety? We found the competencies and capabilities needed for leadership around safety were actually not that different," she explains.
General business leadership and people management skills - so crucial in times of doubt - are often the first victims of cost cutting. Not so at Georgiou. "I've fought too hard to make sure things aren't squeezed too much," laughs Ivankovich. "Often my colleagues in other companies talk about their whole recruitment departments being slashed and training being cut back to nothing. We haven't done that. We've just invested in a two and a half day workshop, branded to reflect our values called "STEP Up", for our senior managers which we could have cut. However, we view strong leadership as being so important right now, and we want to give our people some tools and ways of identifying how their leadership actually drives the performance of the business. It's not just an add-on or nice-to-have."