People and Community
Our communities
A key element of our vision is to support communities to thrive. Engaging and supporting our communities and our customers to help deliver this vision is an integral part of what we do.
Our support includes financial donations through our Independent Retailer network, the donation of staff time, and the donation of food and products to those in our communities who are most vulnerable.
Our Independent Retailer network has donated over $80 million into local communities over the past 27 years through our Community Chest Fund. This has supported over 7,000 charities at a national, state and local level, including schools, sporting clubs, country fire services, hospitals and disaster relief services.
Many communities across Australia have benefited from the purchase of much-needed medical equipment, school equipment, and local fire-fighting equipment; as well as through disaster relief support such as food and gift vouchers.
During the FY17 year:
- IGAs across NSW and the ACT donated $150,000 to the Humpty Dumpty Foundation to support the purchase of medical equipment for hospitals.
- In Victoria, the IGA network donated $50,000 to the Royal Children’s Hospital Good Friday Appeal.
- The IGA network has a proud history of supporting local communities in times of need. The Queensland IGA network donated $100,000 in gift cards to residents affected by Cyclone Debbie. While in the worst impacted areas, IGA West Mackay, SUPA IGA Sarina, SUPA IGA Bowen and SUPA IGA Proserpine donated our Community Co water and UHT long-life milk to local SES centres to assist those impacted by the cyclone.
- At a national level, we have long-standing support partnerships with the Special Olympics, St Vincent de Paul and the McGrath Foundation. All three charities received both in-kind support through staff volunteerism, as well as financial support.
Metcash also has a long-standing partnership with Foodbank and since 2012, the business has donated over 1,000,000 kilograms of food to Foodbank*.
Living healthier lives – Promoting healthy families and communities
As we aspire to be healthier and happier as a community, it is important that we deliver nutritious food options for our consumers and provide supporting educational materials on positive lifestyle choices.
One way in which we support and promote health and nutrition to the community is through the IGA Family Program.
Under the IGA Family Program, we provide members with tools to promote healthy lifestyles.
This includes providing communities with access to healthy and affordable recipes, arts and craft activities that encourage creativity and recycling, fact sheets to teach children about the origins of food, as well as special offers to help our members shop to a budget.
Since the program’s inception in August 2016, just over 17,000 families have become members and thousands more have benefited from our education materials.
The program has also recently partnered with the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation to provide our independent retail network with a way to support their local school’s onsite garden and kitchen. The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation assists schools to develop a program that teaches students how to garden, harvest produce and cook delicious food.
Since our partnership commenced in July 2017 we have successfully facilitated 30 school kitchen garden programs across Australia.
Safety and well-being
The safety of our people, contractors and visitors is at the core of everything we do. We continue to strive for improvement and to be world-class in safety.
In FY17 we implemented additional initiatives to improve our safety performance, including progressing greater automation of processes to reduce the risk of manual handling; as well as increasing awareness across our operations around the safety of our people, contractors and visitors.
In addition to safety, the well-being of our people is a top priority. Reflecting this, the company provides the opportunity for employees to access a range of employee benefits to promote well-being. These include well-being leave days, volunteering days, flexible working arrangements, counselling services, paid parental leave and allowing eligible employees to access an additional week of leave per year.
Diversity, inclusion and our people
Inclusion and diversity are fundamental to our culture and core values. We recognise that each person has unique strengths and that high performance is underpinned by embracing those strengths.
In addition to being a member of the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA), the company has established a Diversity and Inclusion Council that is responsible for driving greater awareness of diversity and inclusion across the organisation, as well as creating a comprehensive action plan for the Metcash group.
We believe that encouraging diversity will contribute to high performance by driving business results, encouraging greater innovation; and by attracting, recruiting, engaging and retaining a diverse team of high-quality people.
- The Metcash workforce is currently comprised of 33% females and 67% males. Women now hold 30% of all senior manager roles in the company. Woman account for 43% of the Metcash Board of Directors, which is well ahead of the ASX 200 average.
- We also made significant progress addressing gender pay disparity, with the average percentage difference between male and female pay reducing from 9.7% at the end of FY16 to 5.1% at the end of FY17.
*Foodbank rescues edible but surplus food and groceries from the country’s farmers, manufacturers and retailers, and donates this to over 2,600 charities and 1,750 schools.