Health, Safety & Wellbeing
Embedding a culture of care and wellbeing.
Our approach and position
Westpac’s Health, Safety & Wellbeing Commitment
Westpac’s approach to health, safety and wellbeing (HSW) focusses on:
- Protecting our people by eliminating or minimising work-related physical and psychological harm as reasonably practicable
- Improving our peoples’ experience of work, performance and wellbeing by supporting positive mental health
- Regularly engaging with our people on HSW matters to understand their experience and needs
- Maintaining our strong safety leadership capability by clearly assigning and communicating HSW responsibilities and monitoring performance
- Prevention of sexual and gender-based harassment in the workplace driven by a zero tolerance for any discrimination, harassment and bullying
- Continuously reviewing and uplifting our HSW management system, including meeting our HSW and workers compensation legal requirements
- Providing accessible and easy to understand information, training, and support to help our people to do their jobs safely and effectively
Refer to our Health, Safety and Wellbeing Statement of Commitment (PDF 195KB) to learn more about our approach.
Our policies
Our Health, Safety & Wellbeing (HSW) Policy (PDF 221KB) sets our approach to managing HSW including responsibilities for leaders and team members, consultation and training, preventing harassment, and workers compensation and injury management. Our HSW management system is developed to manage and protect the HSW of our people, contractors, suppliers and customers.
We maintain a comprehensive HSW management system which complies with work, health and safety (WHS) laws and self insurance regulator standards. External regulator monitoring occurs to demonstrate satisfactory HSW and injury management performance against recognised standards such as ISO 45001 and the National Audit Tool. Regulator monitoring includes site inspections, audits, review of data and other verification activities.
How we're taking action
Key action areas
Support services
Our people and their immediate families have access to a free Employee Assistance Program (EAP) which offers a variety of services, such as counselling and coaching for people leaders. Our Employee Care team, which includes allied health professionals, provides support to our people to remain physically and mentally healthy at work and beyond, connecting them to care, injury management and return to work support where necessary.
Benefits and resources
We have toolkits, videos and programs dedicated to support the wellbeing of our people and their families. We also offer discounts on wellbeing products and services, free flu vaccinations each year, two ‘Culture, Lifestyle and Wellbeing’ paid days off per year and one Volunteering day.
Learning & development
All employees must complete HSW training and participate in regular conversations on safety and wellbeing in their team meetings using dedicated information packs. Our leaders are provided additional HSW training, which includes managing workplace mental health risks and providing supportive leadership to support employee wellbeing.
A mentally healthy workplace
We are committed to providing a mentally healthy workplace by improving our peoples’ experience at work and supporting positive mental health. Under the guidance of our Chief Mental Health Officer, we have a mental health strategy that focusses on preventing harm, early intervention and connected care along with safety leadership, culture and capability.
We have a range of resources available for our people to access, including processes to assess and manage workplace mental health risks and the provision of training developed in partnership with the Black Dog Institute.
Working environment
We aim to achieve best practice for the fit-out of our offices and branches. We are a member of the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA), which helps guide our approach. Our CBD corporate workplaces support our hybrid way of working and enable our people to collaborate, connect, and focus. To support our people’s wellbeing, we have end-of-trip facilities to support employee exercise and carbon neutral commuting. Visit our locations page for more information on our workplaces.
Our progress
We seek to report regularly to help stakeholders compare our relative performance over time.
Find out more in our Annual Report and sustainability performance reports.