John McCrindle didn’t set out to be a champion of diversity in the workplace.
“It happened by accident about 18 years ago,” he explains.
The engineer and executive, who is now the national manager of property and network at Caltex Australia, was working at the time for another company in a logistics role. He only had two female staff members but he made a few immediate changes.
“They had the girlie posters up and I said, ‘We’re not having that. My wife will come here’, so we took them down,” McCrindle recalls. “The ladies toilet was used as a storage room so we fixed that up and that was the start of changing the culture so it was less hostile towards women.”
Four years later, women made up two-thirds of McCrindle’s leadership team and a quarter of his operators. The results were compelling.
“Performance measures in every department went up,” he says. “Everything from our financial performance to our health and safety statistics were better.”
It was around this time that he found out his warehouse manager was expecting, the first time he’d had a pregnant team member.
“I said, “Fantastic! Congratulations! Wonderful news,” he says. “I then wondered what do I do now? My boss at the time was a female so I rang her and asked for some advice.”
She gave him some guidance and mentioned that the employee might lose some confidence which will be important to understand.
“I said, “No she’s one of my best performers so that won’t be a problem’,” he said. “She said that she’d lost confidence when she’d been on maternity leave. I couldn’t believe it.”
His manager encouraged him to keep in contact with her when she’s off on leave.
“She said I didn’t need to talk to her about babies but instead give her the rundown on what’s happening in the office so she feels connected,” McCrindle says.
His boss’s final piece of advice was to get the employee back to work part-time as quickly as she wanted, and to anticipate some tears at the beginning but to persevere.
“So that’s what I did and after six months she came back in one day a week,” he says.
McCrindle, who went on to join Caltex Australia in 2012, says he’s now more polished in managing maternity leave due in part to the fact each time he’s had open conversations with his employees about what has and hasn’t worked.
“I’ve had 30 women go on maternity leave and I haven’t lost one. I have 100% success in return to work.”
“My Distribution Engineering Services Support Coordinator has just come back from maternity leave part-time and she said the process was seamless. I ring every week to tell them what’s going on. They’re not sick and having those conversations is just one way to keep the relationship going.”
McCrindle joined Caltex in the same year that it launched its ground-breaking BabyCare package, which provides financial and practical support for new parents as they return to work. The fuel supplier has also focused on making roles flexible, which is proving to be attractive to new and existing employees as well as very beneficial for parents trying to juggle work and home responsibilities.
From McCrindle’s perspective managing maternity leave transitions effectively is a win-win. He has found that utilising part-time or flexible work arrangements when someone is returning is a valuable opportunity to boost their skills and the team’s performance.
“Having someone who can work on the business for some time rather than in the business is fantastic because that strategy drives continuous improvement and gets better results,” he says.
Working in the same role for ten years can be the same experience effectively repeated ten times, McCrindle says, so giving team members a new brief is beneficial.
“From an educational perspective it’s actually more important to keep learning and updating skills rather than doing the same thing over and over,” he says.
In McCrindle’s view creating a culture that has supported a more diverse talent base is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing.
“I came at diversity and inclusion by accident but I just kept getting better and better results,” he says. “Having more diverse teams means you get more diversity of thought, more view points and that drives performance absolutely. Diversity is more than gender though so you can have a mixed team and still not have diversity.
The critical thing in McCrindle’s view is to create an inclusive culture.
“If you don’t and someone is different they will feel excluded,” he says. “When you focus on this area you have to think, how can I make it work rather than why it can’t work. If you look for solutions instead of why it won’t work it’s amazing what you can do.”
The Human Rights Commission’s recent Pregnancy Review revealed that one in two Australian women face discrimination whilst on leave or returning to work after a baby. What does someone who has managed maternity leave successfully, many times over, make of this?
“It makes me angry,” McCrindle says. “The sad thing is I don’t think there’s much evil intent. The ones who are malicious are, in some ways, easier to target and address. It’s the people who think they’re being caring, and doing the right thing, but are making passive assumptions about women where the discrimination is more subtle and difficult to tackle.”
One of McCrindle’s strategies for addressing passive discrimination is to create some understanding among his team of the different ways men and women work and think. Each time he joins a new team he shows a short video by Dr Pat Heim that demonstrates simply and with good-humour some of the different assumptions men and women make.
“Three-quarters of my team end up taking it home to show their families,” he says. “It starts a non-judgemental conversation about men and women. It’s powerful.”
McCrindle has faced some resistance over his career in his quest to build an inclusive culture. But, he says for the most part people come around, because ultimately they benefit from the changes.
“Interestingly one of my most strident critics said to me a few years ago, ‘You know our culture has been completely transformed’. You end up with a culture where people actually like coming to work.”