Our people and systems shape our safety-focused, high-performance and values-based culture, which is reflected in the way we work, the decisions we take, the courage we show and the legacy we leave.
Attracting, developing and retaining talented people
Those who embrace opportunities, reflect the communities in which we operate and are engaged in fulfilling our purpose, delivering our strategy and living our values.
Supporting our people
We aim to shape a positive employee experience and maintain constructive labour relations.
Fostering an engaged, inclusive and diverse workforce
An inclusive culture and diverse workforce allows for greater collaboration and innovation, and enhanced performance including our safety metrics.
We use a range of metrics and surveys to measure our performance in providing inclusive, welcoming workplaces. These include measurable objectives for our inclusion and diversity progress, and our annual Your Voice employee survey.
You can learn more about our performance in our Annual Report 2025 and Sustainability Databook 2025.
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Our South32 Experience
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At South32, we aim to be welcoming, inclusive and embrace and celebrate differences. We seek to provide an environment where everyone can feel safe to speak up and we work as a team, with a commitment to delivering excellence in all that we do.
Our Approach to People and Culture outlines our focus on fostering an engaged, inclusive and diverse workforce, while shaping a positive employee experience.
We work to provide and maintain a safe and inclusive workplace free from discrimination bullying and harassment.
We engage with our employees on our culture and their experiences working at South32, including through periodic perception surveys, to inform our approach to continuous improvement.
Our Board and Lead Team are focused on fostering a culture that aligns with our purpose, reflects our values and supports delivery of our strategy. To support this, our Board, Lead Team and Senior Leadership Team assess our culture periodically using our Culture Tensions Model, which provides a common language and structured approach to evaluating current and desired cultural characteristics.
Our Code of Business Conduct sets the standards of conduct that we expect of our employees and contractors, executive management and Directors.
Our leadership model defines the accountabilities, behaviours and competencies expected of our people. Together with our values, they clearly define our expectations for workplace behaviours.
We facilitate conversations and training with our employees and contractors to build understanding and reiterate expectations on appropriate workplace conduct. We also support and encourage people to speak up when our values and Code of Business Conduct are not being followed.
Actions and behaviours misaligned to our expected behaviours and Code are managed through our disciplinary processes which may, and have, resulted in disciplinary action up to, and including, dismissal.We monitor the employment market to offer market-competitive remuneration and benefits and have designed our reward framework to recognise performance, leadership and behaviours that promote our values and purpose.
Our remuneration framework includes a short-term incentive payment for eligible employees, and we offer employees the opportunity to acquire shares in South32 through our Allshare Equity Plan and participate in our financial success.
Our employees receive additional benefits that reflect local labour markets, and we offer market-competitive entitlements for parental leave and provide opportunities for employees to balance personal and business priorities with flexible work arrangements, where feasible.We support professional development and provide learning opportunities for employees.
Our learning and development channels include internal training and learning programs for specific role profiles, self-assigned learning, and external capability programs with specialist vendors. Employees may apply for additional training through our education assistance procedure.We support the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining.
We maintain a global employee relations framework and engage in collective labour negotiations where appropriate, working to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Our minimum requirements for suppliers state that wages and benefits (including overtime) paid for a standard working week, must satisfy, at a minimum, national legal standards or local industry benchmarks. We work with approved recruitment agencies and pay for the cost of recruitment activities.Our psychosocial risk framework standardises how we identify, assess and manage psychosocial risks, including harmful behaviours (e.g. sexual harassment, bullying, aggression) and work-related factors such as job design and organisational structure.
With implementation underway at our Australian operations, we continue to embed context-specific psychosocial risks into risk management processes across other locations.
Learn more in our Annual Report 2025.
We understand that an engaged, inclusive, and diverse workforce allows for greater collaboration, innovation, and performance.
Our approach to inclusion and diversity is overseen by our Board and guided by our Inclusion and Diversity Policy. Each year, we develop a Group Inclusion and Diversity Action Plan, approved by our CEO, to guide our efforts in building a more inclusive workplace.
We measure our inclusion and diversity progress through a set of measurable objectives which are approved annually by our Board.
We conduct annual gender and ethnicity pay equity reviews and continue to invest in actions to improve pay equity across our workforce.
Pay equity and fair and equitable remuneration information is provided in our Annual Report 2025 and Sustainability Databook 2025.
WGEA is an Australian Government statutory agency created by the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (The Act). The Act requires annual employee remuneration disclosures for Australian private sector employers and Commonwealth public sector organisations with 100 or more employees. WGEA uses the mandatory disclosures to calculate each reporting organisation’s gender pay gap with the objective of creating gender remuneration transparency.
For the 2023-24 reporting period (1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024), South32 had a gender pay gap of 3.8% (inclusive of CEO and Heads of remuneration) which is broadly consistent with the previous reporting period. South32 benchmarked well against WGEA Gender Equality Indicators – which compare our performance to industry and national averages.
The WGEA report for 2023-24 is available below:
WGEA South32 Executive Summary 2023-24
We have lodged our 2024-2025 report, and the Public Report is available below. Any queries can be directed to [email protected]
