Building A Brand

Three years ago Leighton Contractors set an aggressive strategy to build a strong and profitable business across its core markets of Construction, Mining, Industrial Services, Investment, Building and Telecommunications. To do this, the business recognised that employee engagement was a critical driver in supporting and motivating the workforce, and made the strategic decision to focus on building the brand from the inside out.

Impact has partnered with Leighton Contractors on this three-year journey, helping to align a geographically dispersed workforce with the business direction, strengthen the connection between the leadership team and employees and build a can-do values based culture. In this time, Impact has provided strategic counsel and planning, executive leadership coaching, supported and managed the delivery of events (like their group wide company updates, safety and leadership summits) and conducted qualitative ‘Word On The Street’ research with their employees.

The strong focus on employee engagement has paid off with 72% of the workforce reporting high engagement levels with the business. And Impact continues to work with the Leighton team to ensure the ever expanding workforce, which has increased from 2,500 to over 8000 employees, is engaged.

Refining Talkback

Caltex Australia Limited, the largest refiner and marketer of petroleum products in Australia, recognised engaging their 1000 refining operations employees was critical if they were going to achieve their goal to be a high performance, continuous improvement organisation.

From our ‘Word On The Street’ research, a key challenge identified was the need to strengthen the connection with the leadership team and improve the cascade of open, honest information down the line.

As part of a broader engagement strategy, Impact produced the Refining Talkback radio program, where the senior leadership team openly discussed employee concerns with representatives from across their two refining plants. This program gave employees, many of whom work shifts, the opportunity to hear the senior leadership team responding to their questions. Accompanying this program were support materials for supervisors to help them stimulate discussion around key workplace issues in their weekly meetings.

A pulse check survey revealed that 75% of employees had listened to Talkback and over half of the employees sampled believed that the program demonstrated that the leadership team cared about addressing employees’ issues.