Employers must do more to attract, train, retain, and promote Indigenous employees, according to a groundbreaking new analysis that sheds light on Indigenous employment practises at some of Australia’s largest companies.
The Minderoo Foundation’s Generation One initiative unveiled the first Indigenous Employment Index in Australia, surveying 42 of the country’s largest companies, accounting for almost 700,000 workers.
The Indigenous Employment Index was commissioned and directed by the Minderoo Foundation’s Generation One initiative, which seeks to close the Indigenous employment gap in one generation. Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre performed the study, as did Murawin, an Indigenous-owned consultancy that co-authored the Index alongside Generation One.
The report’s results were informed by extensive surveys of each employer and more than 100 respondents. It found participating firms still need to do more to achieve parity, with 2.2 per cent Indigenous employees on average, compared to 3.3 per cent in the broader population.
It also found racism against Indigenous employees is frequent in the workplace, with more than half of Indigenous respondents experiencing direct or indirect racism now and in the past.
Indigenous presence at senior leadership levels was only 0.7 per cent among the firms who provided data.
Wilman-Nyoongar woman Shelley Cable, Director of Generation One, stated that while employers were progressing towards parity, there was still a long way to go before real parity was established and ingrained as a common way of doing business.
“We know that lots of organisations, including those in the property industry, have very good intention and goodwill around trying to achieve reconciliation or Indigenous employment parity, but so often, they just don’t know how,” she said.
The report said employers needed to set strong Indigenous employment objectives, have a strategy to deliver on those targets and report on progress towards them on a regular and transparent basis to assess the efficacy of Indigenous employment plans.
“We found that organisations did those three things had more than double the rate of Indigenous employment in their organisations than those that didn’t,” Cable said.
“It speaks to not just having an aspiration, but putting some rigor around it, having a plan on how you’re going to achieve it and making sure it’s not about the commitment, it’s about the how and the practical actions, and then being honest and transparent around progress.”
Another call to action was to focus on maintaining current Indigenous staff rather than just focussing on recruiting.
A big way to achieve this is through treating racism as a safety issue and acknowledging that work is still required to ensure that workplaces are culturally safe for Indigenous employees.
“What we’re asking employers to do is to treat racism as they do other safety issues… to understand that racism and safety in the workplace from a cultural and psychological perspective is just as critical as physical safety,” Cable said.
Another way is removing the career progression ceiling and encouraging Indigenous persons into leadership positions, something that the index has shown is lacking in corporate Australia.
“From my own personal career experience, someone took a chance on me and appointed me despite never having been a CEO before and despite never having had a team before,” Cable said.
“It’s quite a small pool of existing Indigenous executives, so the solution has to be growing that pool, and the only way you can grow that pool sustainably is to give chances to new people to actually join that group of Indigenous executives across the country.
“We talk about it all the time that diverse perspectives are important, we don’t want groupthink. But yet, there’s still exclusion of Indigenous Australians at those leadership tables. So, I think it’s pretty clear to say that employers are actually missing out as much, if not more, than Indigenous Australians by not having them there.”
According to Cable, the property business is well positioned to achieve parity. She cited the approximately 1.4 million people employed by the industry as one of the reasons, with a concentration of positions accessible for school-based trainees or apprentices.
“[There are] lots of entry level roles that are available in the property industry that a lot of other industries wish they had,” she said.
“If you take professional services as an example, they continuously struggle with the fact there’s not a lot of Indigenous university graduates and often that’s a requirement for them to get into professional services. And so, they look to groups like the property industry to say, ‘I wish we could have those opportunities where we can take school-based trainees or take apprentices and actually develop them into the organisations’ I think that’s a really unique opportunity.”