What’s the issue?

Our team members are central to the ongoing success of our business. As the world continues to evolve and adapt in response to new innovations and challenges, we need to make sure that our teams have the tools, capabilities and resources they need to succeed in their professional lives now and into the future. Like many Australian businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the way we work, requiring us to adapt and respond to ongoing uncertainty, but providing us with numerous learning opportunities in the process.

What are we doing?

Each year we conduct an annual engagement survey to measure overall team member engagement, and gather feedback relating to topics including career development, growth and learning opportunities. One of the strongest areas of feedback came from our instore managers who are seeking more development in the fundamental skills of being a leader. As a result, we have created and invested in developing Spark, a comprehensive development program that will support all line managers to build their confidence in core management and leadership skills.

We have continued to experience growth in our online channel, and as a result invested in supply chain technology solutions during the year as part of the Victorian Customer Fulfilment Centre relocation. Aside from improving fulfillment rates and speed to market, the key priority for us was to further enhance team member wellbeing, safety and job satisfaction through reducing repetitive tasks and manual handling. Existing team members had the opportunity to learn and expand their skillset with hands-on technical training, investing in them to have the right skills for the future and enabling them to continue to grow their careers with Officeworks.

Over the last year, our Support Office teams continued working remotely. We further invested in technology to support hybrid working, such as online collaboration tools, and strengthened our teams skills in virtual tools through online training programs.

Building our digital, analytics and supply chain capability will also continue to be critical as we grow our business and evolve our every channel offer as well as continuing to ensure our support office team members are equipped and supported to work in a flexible and hybrid way.

We understand that it is critical to continue upskilling our workforce and are supporting our team members' ongoing development so they can continue to deliver great service for our customers and provide meaningful roles for our team members.

We are also heavily focused on building Talent Management maturity and creating a healthy talent pipeline to support the internal career progression for our team members. Even with the challenges during the past year, more than 1,000 Officeworks team members were seconded to another role, promoted or had a transfer into another opportunity at Officeworks.

Focus for FY2022

We will increase investment in several key areas to enable more of our team to continue to grow their career, skills and knowledge. This will include more than 300 leaders across the business undertaking our Spark leadership development program and exploring pathway programs to support the career progression for even more team members, as well as investing in further building the product knowledge of the whole team enabling them to deliver even better service to customers

Learn more about another 2025 commitment