Designing for diversity

Designing for diversityLike safety, diversity and flexibility should be non-negotiables on the construction site as the industry works to lift the unacceptably low representation of women, says Lendlease’s chief Steve McCann.Speaking at the Green Cities 2016 conference in Sydney last week, the group chief executive officer and managing director of Lendlease said diversity sits alongside sustainability and safety as a core operating principle of his company.McCann is driving an ambitious diversity agenda within his organisation through the Property Male Champions of Change initiative, and has been vocal in his commitment to “inclusive leadership”. Lendlease is taking action on a number of fronts. A company-wide line-by-line review of salaries in 2014 uncovered pay discrepancies that have since been addressed, and Lendlease will repeat the process again this year. “We aim to achieve true pay parity over the next two years,” McCann says.The company will also roll out unconscious bias training to every employee in the organisation over the next 12 months.These are just two of the initiatives Lendlease is driving, but McCann acknowledges it’s a long road ahead. While 56 per cent of the company’s development business is female, in some pockets of the construction business just 15 per cent of the workforce are women.McCann says this is “totally unacceptable”.Flexibility is inextricably linked with creating a more diverse workforce. While 41 per cent of staff worked flexibly in some way in 2015, Lendlease faces a big challenge in delivering flexibility for its 9000-strong construction workforce, McCann says.”In a commoditised, low-margin market like construction, our ability to deliver change is constrained without the support of our development partners,” he said, adding the issue must be tackled on an industry-wide basis.”You have to plan flexibility into the cost of doing business,” McCann argues, explaining that the best parallel is the industry’s safety journey.”Safety is clearly a non-negotiable – you don’t have to explain it to people. Diversity should be just as obvious.”Just as safety is embedded into costing and planning at the initial stages of a project, so must diversity and flexibility “so we are designing out the problems”.And just as the most efficient work sites are also the safest, so too McCann says the most diverse workforces will also deliver the best results. “Up front it might look more expensive, but I can tell you it won’t be.”