Executive Summary
NSW Roads and Maritime Services’ asset management team is building a more diverse workforce.
Under leadership of our Regional Director, John Dinan, 50 percent of all new regional road workers recruited this year are women. John achieved this by removing barriers to participation, making workplace changes, and developing a targeted recruitment campaign.
This innovative approach delivered close to 1400 applicants from across the state. The end result was that 15 new female road workers and 23 new female apprentices and trainees joined Roads and Maritimes’ ranks in late January 2019.
- Summary of your asset management team
NSW Roads and Maritime Services manages and maintains $94.4 billion in assets. That’s more than a quarter of NSW Government’s infrastructure assets. These include roads, bridges, tunnels, traffic signals, as well as intelligent transport and information systems.
Our asset management team employs close to 3,000 people spread across the state. Their job is to get more out our network so that more people and freight can be moved on our roads – in our cities and regions.
Maintaining our regional assets is led by our Regional Maintenance Director, John Dinan. He oversees more than 1,300 people who keep regional communities connected with quality roads.
2. Demonstration of Organisational Leadership in creating and maintaining
Roads and Maritime Chief Executive Ken Kanofski says “diversity is a key priority and focus for us. Not only because it is absolutely the right thing to do, but also because it is the smart thing to do.”
It’s a philosophy that we are putting into practice in our policies, plans and decision-making at all levels.
Roads and Maritime is building a more diverse workforce. Our Diversity and Inclusion Plan 2020 outlines our five priority areas:
- Increasing women represented in the workplace, at every level and area
- Increasing Aboriginal representation at all levels
- Increasing workforce diversity which includes people with disability, CALD and LGBTIQA
- Developing an inclusive culture through flexible mindsets and flexible work practices
- Partnering with industry and networks to improve diversity and sense of community.
We’ve set ourselves clear goals, including achieving a target of having women in at least 35 percent of all senior service roles by 2020. As of January 2019, 30.7 percent of our senior service roles were held by women.
Our asset management team in particular is improving women’s participation in our workforce too by driving new approaches to recruitment.
Asset management leaders like John Dinan recognise that it is important to attract and retain women at every level of the organisation.
“Community attitudes and expectations are changing and organisations like ours need to keep up. That means making a bigger effort to encourage women into all sorts of ‘non-traditional’ roles, including outdoor road work,” John says.
John said the need for change really hit him two years ago when at meeting of his field managers on International Women’s Day there was not a single female manager in the room of 50 people.
3. Demonstration of Innovation in your asset management team
Under John Dinan’s leadership, 50 percent of all new regional road workers recruited this year are women.
He achieved this by removing barriers to participation, making workplace changes, and developing a targeted recruitment campaign.
Thanks to John’s intervention a truck drivers’ licence is no long required to apply for road worker roles at Roads and Maritime.
Traditionally, women tended not to have a truck drivers’ license but John identified this as a qualification that could be easily obtained after 3-4 months of on-the-job training.
By changing this, John not only removed a barrier to participation but was able to transform a straight recruitment drive into a training program. This enabled him to specifically target women to fill up to 15 roles.
Now, managers who choose the most suitable candidate can provide them with necessary training to get a truck driver’s licence, a certificate in civil construction at TAFE and on-the-job training on all facets of road work.
On top of this, John’s recruitment campaign used digital advertising to target women and Aboriginal candidates for trade-specific roles including plant mechanics, carpentry and civil construction.
This innovative approach delivered close to 1400 applicants from across the state. The end result was that 15 new female road workers and 23 new female apprentices and trainees joined Roads and Maritimes’ ranks in late January 2019.
John’s team has also been progressively making our road work sites more inclusive by ensuring amenities reflect the needs of different genders.
John has now set a recruitment target of having women fill at least 50 percent of all regional maintenance job vacancies. His aim is to recruit more women into supervisor roles and to have at least one all women road crew.
4. Diversity benefits
John Dinan’s diversity and inclusion achievements are already bearing fruit, changing the lives of Roads and Maritime’s new recruits and our asset management teams.
It has opened up new career opportunities for these newly appointed women road workers, apprentices and trainees, providing a possibility of moving into supervisor and more senior positions sometime in the future.
Roads and Maritime’s regional maintenance teams are predominately made up of people who come from the regional communities where we work.
By building a more diverse and inclusive workforce, we are also demonstrating to our existing regional teams how committed we are to the future of their work and communities.
Roads and Maritime’s commitment to diversity has been showcased at Roads Australia.
5. General Comments
John says what he learnt from this recent experience was how to remove barriers to increasing women’s participation in Roads and Maritime’s asset management workforce.
“Current community expectations around diversity mean there is no excuse for poor rates of women’s participation in any workforce. So, if you want to changes things, you will find a way to remove all internal and external barriers to getting more women into your team.”