As AECOM Chief Executive, Australia NZ, Lara Poloni leads a team of 4,000 designers, engineers, planners, scientists, economists and project managers
When Lara Poloni joined AECOM 22 years ago, there were only two other women in the office of 120 people: one was an engineer, the other a ‘tea lady’.
When Poloni was named CEO of the infrastructure firm just over two years ago, she took the initiative to push for a serious shift in the gender make-up of the firm.
Speaking to her leadership team she asked the question: This is important to me. Is it important to you?
“Everyone said yes,” Poloni tells Women’s Agenda. “So we agreed we were going to start fresh, make it a key business strategy, hold each other accountable, and decide on measurable targets to track progress. It [the strategy] would not just be a document with a whole lot of words.”
In May 2015, AECOM established a number of goals, including a 20% target of female leadership by 2020. Twelve months later, the firm can already boast a number of wins. It’s increased the percentage of female senior leaders from 10% to 12.6%, achieved a massive 50/50 gender split amongst its next undergraduate intake of 119, reduced the gender pay gap by 3.4%, and just been named Australia’s Most Outstanding Company in Gender Diversity by Engineers Australia.
They are measurable, tangible results that show the company still has work to do, but can celebrate its initial progress.
So how have they made it happen?
It’s helps that they found an absolute advocate for the cause in appointing Poloni. The mother of boy/girl twins says the matter of workplace gender equality is very personal for her.
From there, it’s taken hard work and commitment.
At the graduate level where men continue to dominate the relevant STEM degrees AECOM hires from, the firm started recruiting a lot earlier than their competitors, developed campaigns to showcase the projects they do, and held a number of inhouse seminars to get women engaged in their work.
On the pay gap, like many CEOs Poloni admits she initially didn’t think they had a problem.
“I had assumed that we didn’t have an issue because we were paying close attention to starter salaries for grads, and we knew there was 100% equality there,” she says. “We’d also done simple fixes, like making sure women on maternity leave still continued to have their salaries reviewed.”
But it wasn’t enough. A pay audit revealed that intervention was needed. “It’s only when you open yourself up completely, to every job, to every classification, that you can start to see the issue. We had to take a lid off, so to speak, and look deeper. I was surprised by what I saw.”
She says gaps were particularly emerging as lateral hires came in at mid and senior levels. “We’d recruit someone new, bring them in, and then it was at that point we [later] realized there wasn’t enough rigor at staging an intervention to ask if that person’s salary will be equivalent to other people already in the organisation.” The firm started putting “real money” behind fixing the problem, including half a million dollars last financial year to ensure they could fix small imbalances as they were spotted. Poloni says they will look to do the same thing again with the next round of pay reviews.
On the leadership target, which Poloni says was a real “stretch target” when it was established in 2015, they’ve made a number of external hires to help. “That’s been fantastic, it’s demonstrated to me that there are amazing female leaders out there who have a huge impact. I’m really pleased with the external hires that I’ve made in the past 12 months.”
Poloni’s been encouraged by the support of her leadership team and the broader business on building a more gender-diverse firm, but says the biggest surprise has been how much the change has been welcomed by clients. “It’s really enabled us to strengthen our client relationships at the same time,” she says. “That’s an added bonus.”
