Careers

People policies

Harassment and discrimination

The Westpac Group is a large organisation made up of a diverse group of people. This diversity is one of our strengths. It is important to us that all our people enjoy a supportive, harmonious workplace, free of prejudice, harassment and discrimination. In fact, it's a right we're all entitled to.

We aim to eliminate discrimination and harassment from our work environment. However, when it does occur we deal with it quickly, confidentially, impartially and effectively.

Our process for handling allegations about discrimination and harassment covers all employees, customers and contractors working for Westpac.

We take all reasonable steps to prevent harassment and discrimination from occurring in our workplaces including requiring all employees to undertake discrimination/harassment training and providing them with a copy of our discrimination and harassment policy and procedures.

Freedom of association

Westpac employees have the legal right to collective representation and to participate in union matters. Union membership is a matter of personal choice and Westpac does not discriminate on the basis of membership or non membership.

Under the Westpac Enterprise Development Agreement (EDA) and workplace relations legislation the Finance Sector Union has certain rights of entry into the workplace and access to relevant information. Similarly, the EDA provides employees who are union representatives with certain rights to devote time to union matters, attend courses and carry out union business.

Redundancy, redeployment and retrenchment

Westpac seeks to maximise redeployment when a restructure results in redundancy. This ensures organisational knowledge and skills are retained wherever practical and minimises the need for retrenchment of employees. In circumstances where redeployment is neither successful nor feasible Westpac's Redundancy and Redeployment agreement provides entitlements to people being retrenched.

Employee Health and Safety (EHS)

We review our EHS performance against a number of interlinked performance measures and external best practice benchmarks. This helps us understand the full range of issues affecting our people, including contractors and visitors.

Our Employee Assistance Program provides confidential counselling for our people and immediate families on a range of issues. This may include relationship and family problems, stress management, grief and bereavement and trauma management. This service is provided by independent external counselling specialists located in each state of Australia.

Our Critical Incident Management Program provides assistance to employees requiring counselling after a traumatic event. This can include hold-ups, personal threats in the workplace, the death of a work colleague, or external events such as floods or bushfires.

Concern reporting and whistle blowing

Westpac has a number of processes in place for dealing with workplace grievances. This includes a grievance handling process which aims to resolve issues between the people concerned and their managers, and provides escalation to senior managers if the matter is not resolved.

Employees are also actively encouraged to bring any problems to the attention of management or the Board, including activities or behaviour in conflict with the Code of Conduct, Code of Accounting Practice and Financial reporting, the Insider Trading Policy, other regulatory requirements or laws.

Our concern reporting system is an intranet based service (Concern Online) which allows anonymous two-way communication between the investigator and the person raising the concern, and a telephone service (Concern Hotline), which connects them to a trained staff member at an independent organisation.

This system is consistent with the Australian standard AS 8004 (Whistleblower protection programs) released in 2003.