Intractable problems aren’t solved through inertia. They take a determination to listen, learn and lead – and this is precisely what Consult Australia's Firm of the Year Jacobs and its leader Rich Hayers are doing.

Jacobs took home the prestigious Firm of the Year award at the Consult Australia Awards in April 2023. Rich Hayers, *Vice President and General Manager for Jacobs in Australia and New Zealand, says the team was “extremely proud” to win the award. 

Jacobs was also presented with high commendations for technological innovation, design and superior sustainability on three projects. The Jacobs team was particularly proud to win the People First category, Rich says. This was “external validation” that a four-year focus on inclusion and diversity was capturing industry interest and making inroads into an intractable problem.

The 2022 Consult Australia Progress Report, published in February 2023, shows that women account for 34.2% of all employees in the engineering, advisory and design sectors, up from 33.4% the previous year. 

But structural and cultural change around equality can be hard to shift. Just 13% of qualified professional engineers in Australia are women, for instance, and around 12% of the construction workforce is female, according to Consult Australia’s Thinking Smarter About Skills report.

Rich, who leads a 3,000-strong team across Australia and New Zealand, is a member of the Champions of Change Coalition sub-group established by Consult Australia in 2016. Since then, the group’s 10 members – who, combined, lead 19,000 employees in Australia – have been on a “journey to achieve greater equality in the industry”, Rich says.

“It was intimidating, at first, to be confronted by the challenges around inclusion and diversity in our industry. But we had to start prioritising these crucial conversations to understand how to improve.”

“Listen, learn and lead” – the mantra of the Champions of Change Coalition – has influenced the delivery of Jacobs’ suite of powerful programs for its people. “One thing we’ve learnt – and it sounds so simple – is to listen to our staff,” Rich says.

When Jacobs was revamping its parental leave policy, for example, the company’s statistics revealed that many men weren’t using their provision.

“When we engaged with our people on what mattered around parental leave, they told us the timeline for taking their leave within 12 months was too rushed. So, we extended it to 18 months, as well as created our parental leave for all. This proved that simple measures can have a massive impact on the percentage of men, for example, taking parental leave.” In fact, the proportion of men accessing Jacobs’ parental leave provision rose from 29% to 41% in just one year.

Flexibility continues to be the “default” position for all roles. “Diversity of skills and thought comes when we have access to people we may not have otherwise had – and we didn’t want to lose the talent we had attracted during the pandemic.” Jacobs' latest employee engagement survey confirms this strategy is the right one, with 93.5% of employees satisfied with the flexibility on offer.

Industry leaders are heading in the right direction. But Consult Australia’s Everyday Respect Report, published in 2022, found that progress can mask persistent structural and cultural problems. 

According to the report, two in five female employees said they had experienced or observed some form of exclusionary behaviour in the past two years. That figure rose to one in five people who identify as LGBTIQ+.

In response, Jacobs developed its own Everyday Respect Program, focused on “living inclusive language and behaviour every day”.

“We kept hearing stories of the ‘micro aggressions’ that women and other underrepresented communities had suffered in the industry – either through unconscious or deliberate bias – and we wanted to try to break the pattern. And so we started our journey to raise awareness around the impact that language and behaviour can have every day.”

Inclusive language and behaviour support an inclusive culture – or what Jacobs refers to as a Culture of Caring. Rich points to the simple phrase “work hours” as a powerful alternative to “man-hours” with the same syllables but without implicit exclusion. He notes that carefully chosen words and respectful behaviours can eliminate those micro aggressions and create a culture of psychological safety and belonging.

Jacobs’ Everyday Respect Program has been cascaded through the business with powerful effect. "If you see or hear unconscious bias, it doesn't matter who you are at Jacobs – you have the permission to respectfully call it out.”

As Jacobs makes “intentional” moves towards a global aspirational 40:40:20 gender target – where 40% of the workforce is male, 40% is female, and the remaining 20% is unspecified – Rich says his team is applying the lessons and principles from its Everyday Respect Program to key alliances with constructors and clients.

It is still “early days,” but the evidence gathered so far is compelling. Jacobs has linked the remuneration and key performance indicators of senior leaders to gender representation, and in just three years, the proportion of female managers has increased from 19% to 29% across Australia and New Zealand.

A new area of focus is to elevate the number of senior female technical practitioners. It’s a “big challenge” and starts by ensuring emerging female talent has a “clear line of sight” to technical leaders and experts. “How do we accelerate those with a technical passion that might not have the visibility of a technical leader or expert? That’s what we’re working on now.”

The biggest lesson for other industry leaders? “I think it’s OK to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers,” Rich says. “And so we need to be very deliberate in setting the tone. We must listen with empathy, we must learn with curiosity – and then we must lead with humility and commitment.”

* Since conducting this interview, Rich Hayers has been appointment as Jacobs Vice President of Operations for the Asia Pacific and Middle East region. Eva Wood has replaced him as Vice President and General Manager, Australia and New Zealand.

Don’t miss the opportunity to celebrate your firm’s success in the 2023-24 Consult Australia Awards now open. This is the third in a series of profile stories about the Consult Australia Awards winners. Read our stories on Small Firm of the Year Geotron and Medium Firm of the Year Umwelt.