Diversity and flexibility

At Westpac, we know that to be a great place to work we need to be a leader in diversity and flexibility. We take a strategic view to diversity and inclusiveness and are committed to making Westpac a great place to work for all our employees.

This helps bring benefits for our customers, our business and our people. In fact, the more different perspectives we have, the better equipped we’ll be to come up with the most innovative products and solutions. To meet the needs of our diverse customer base, we need a team that’s every bit as diverse as they are.

Inclusive Culture

An inclusive culture is about having a workplace where every individual can shine regardless of gender, cultural identity, age, ability, sexual orientation, work style or approach.

In the past few years we’ve made significant strides to creating an inclusive culture through initiatives such as signing up to the Rainbow tick, celebrating our women in leadership, creating employee action groups to make sure our employees' diverse needs are represented, and our Iwi cadetship initiative between Westpac and Waikato-Tainui in Hamilton.

We believe being a leader in this space is an ongoing journey, so we’re also involved in several initiatives external to Westpac as part of our long-term commitment in this area – for example we are a foundation sponsorship of New Zealand Global Women, and a foundation partner of the Sir Peter Blake Trust. We are also committed to gender pay equity and have recently been recognised for our work in this area through the inaugural YWCA gender pay award.

Flexible Working

Flexibility is more than just good policies – it’s about flexibility in thinking, challenging assumptions, being innovative and acknowledging the needs of our employees while a the same time meeting business requirements.

We’re focused on flexibility in the workplace, to meet our customers’ banking needs 24/7 and to support our employees work life balance.

We offer a variety of options for our employees including part-time work, career breaks, job sharing, the opportunity to purchase extra leave, and a generous parental leave policy. We also have an on-line flexibility toolkit to support our people leaders with step-by-step processes to apply these practices within their teams.

We also acknowledge that a large percentage of our staff have caring responsibilities, and we have created a Carers Portal for staff to access support services and key information to assist them balance their responsibilities in this area.