During this first year as a separate group, our key focus was aligning the way we manage our people with a high performance culture. We made significant progress in our management of safety and health, and our people planning and development processes.
SAFETY AND HEALTH MANAGEMENT
Safety and health management are critical to our future. This is why our new safety and health performance goal and vision is Zero4Life – the elimination of all recordable1 injuries and occupational illnesses within Rinker. While we made progress by reducing recordable injuries 20% during the year, there is still much work to do.
Tragic reminders of the need for constant vigilance occurred when two employees and a contractor lost their lives on the job: a Florida Materials employee during a concrete delivery, a Readymix China employee during the loading of a concrete truck, and a Readymix Australia delivery contractor on the road. Exhaustive investigations were conducted for all incidents. Actions taken to prevent recurrence included enhanced driver training, modified work procedures and improved disciplinary rules.
Other company-wide initiatives were undertaken last year to help us achieve Zero4Life. These include: retooling of the safety and health management system, the application of root cause analysis and the development of a new auditing process. These initiatives will enhance our ability to protect our employees and contractors, but are no substitute for leadership, accountability and effective communication in this most important work.
PEOPLE PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT
People planning and development is very important in achieving a high performance culture. We have focused on standardising our process for succession planning and high potential development. Over 80% of our general management position openings last year were filled by people from within the group and over 20% of our best performers were moved into positions of greater responsibility. Progress has been made with diversity in Rinker, with growing numbers of females and minorities in managerial positions.
Complementing the thrust on business improvement has been a major drive in the area of corporate ethics and conduct. All managers who work with customers, suppliers, or who can influence markets, were required to commit to a new Code of Ethics and sign a compliance certificate. Compliance programs on Anti-Trust and Trade Practices provisions have been emphasised in the US and Australia. All relevant employees engaged in sales and marketing must complete training and certification requirements annually.
A record number of employees – over 3,000 – completed training during the year. Courses were implemented in the areas of hiring and coaching to improve our leadership team. We conducted Customer FIRST! classes in Readymix, providing more focus on satisfying customers. Our systems training curriculum was updated as part of ‘go-live’ training for our recent Kiewit acquisition, and we established a systems training group in Australia. New graduates continue to be hired as management trainees to improve our bench strength.
INCENTIVE PLANS
Both short and long term incentive plans have been implemented to help instill the high performance culture across the group. These incentives are generally based on increasing shareholder value. This ensures that our people understand that they must deliver a profit or return on all funds invested in their business, which exceeds the cost of those funds. Together with succession planning and training, the incentives are integral to the success of continuous improvement within the Rinker group. They are based on Rinker achieving specific financial goals while reinforcing a culture that is ethical and values based, with the highest safety, health and environmental standards (see pages 33 to 36 for further information on the plans).
1 Including fatalities, lost-time, restricted duty and medical treatment injuries.