Figure 22: QIC Real Estate’s approximate employee numbers as at 30 June 2024

¹ Total QIC Real Estate employees, excluding Savills employees and other external consultants

² Maximum term employees on time-bound contracts

³ Project Workforce employees contracted to deliver a specific contract

We also have a highly successful and constructive relationship with Savills. Savills is contracted to provide employees to work in our shopping centres under QIC General and Centre Management, as well as national team members in our property administration, alternative income and marketing teams. As at 30 June 2024, 186 Savills employees were working across our shopping centre assets.

We work closely with Savills to ensure that our people and culture approach is shared and where possible aligned with the Savills HR team, and across the Savills employee base. As an example, during FY24 we continued to extend a wellbeing program offered through an external consultancy, Bendelta, to both QIC and Savills shopping centre employees to ensure we provided consistent support across the shopping centre teams. 

There have been no significant fluctuations in employee numbers during the reporting period.

At QIC, we believe that our people perform at their best when they feel valued, happy, healthy and encouraged to bring their whole and authentic selves to work every day. Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) remains steadfast as we make significant strides in our strategic pillars: gender equality, LGBTQ+ inclusion, accessibility, cultural and linguistic diversity (CALD), and support for First Nations people.

Following our participation in the Inclusive Employer Index, QIC was recognised as an Inclusive Employer by the Diversity Council of Australia for 2023 – 2024. These accolades underscore our ongoing dedication to fostering a workplace that not only embraces diversity but actively celebrates it.

This year, QIC launched our Mental Health First Aid Officer program, with over 50 officers globally and being recognised as a Skilled Workplace in the Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) Workplace Recognition Program. QIC understands the importance of managing mental health at work and recognises the benefits of creating a mentally healthy workplace.  We are among many workplaces who are seeing the benefits of promoting education and adopting policies and practices that create a ‘culture of care’ where employees are encouraged to talk openly about mental health.

Throughout the last year, QIC continued our partnership with the Australian Business and Community Network (ABCN), a not-for-profit organisation that connects business with low socio-economic status schools through mentoring and partnership programs. Team members across our Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane offices took part in seven programs providing over 160 hours of mentoring.

FY24 also saw the introduction of two new support programs to support carers and parents:

QIC's Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Wellness Working Group

QIC's working group for diversity, equity, inclusion, and wellness, which has representation from across the business (including several QIC Real Estate employees), met a number of times through FY24. This group helps shape QIC’s diversity, equity, inclusion and wellness initiatives, provides feedback to the Board and Executive, and ensures that QIC’s pursuit of a truly diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce is embraced and sustained.

QIC Real Estate gender initiatives

QIC Real Estate established its first Gender Plan in 2021, which is reviewed on a regular basis with the Real Estate senior leadership team. The current plan spans 2023 – 2025 and documents a set of goals to increase female representation within all areas of Real Estate and promote targeted opportunity to help females succeed. Some key achievements of our Gender Plan in FY24 included:

• Launching the third year of the Real Estate Female Sponsorship Program which provides the opportunity for twelve emerging female leaders each year to be actively sponsored by a member of QIC Real Estate’s senior leadership team. The objective of the program is to build a pipeline of females to assume future leadership roles, increase the retention of our high-performing females within Real Estate, and improve the experiences of inclusion for females within our business. For sponsors, the program aims to increase our inclusive leadership capability to support cultural change and provide an opportunity to strengthen and develop the behaviours and habits to successfully sponsor diverse talent.
• Participation in the Property Champions of Change (PCC) project, which is an industry led initiative made up of 24 members across the property sector. The PCC members use their individual and collective leadership to increase gender equality with a focus on leadership, talent development, public advocacy and accountability. Specifically, Real Estate’s Gender Plan targets the PCC’s Panel and Pitch Pledges:
  • Continued adoption of the Property Champions of Change ‘Panel Pledge’, which strives to achieve a 40:40:20 gender balance as speakers, panellists and attendees. This pledge aims to substantially improve women’s representation in public and professional forums.
  • Continued adoption of the Property Champions of Change ‘Pitch Pledge’, ensuring that at least one woman is part of the bid and receiving teams on both sides of any transaction within Leasing and Capital Transactions.

• Undertook a gender pay equity review to understand more deeply gender pay equity across similar roles within Real Estate

• Created and published a Gender Plan and Culture Plan placemat which provides a high-level snapshot of each plan and key achievements and progress against each.
• Utilised the QIC Standards of Excellence award platform to raise the profile of demonstrated gender excellence within QIC.

Other Real Estate gender initiatives undertaken in FY24 included:

• Participation in the Property Council of Australia ‘500 Women in Property’ Program. In FY24, nine female QIC Real Estate employees were selected to participate in the program.
• Representation from Real Estate on the Property Council of Australia’s Diversity and Inclusion Committees in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.

Participants of QIC Real Estate’s FY24 Female Sponsorship Program with QIC General Manager - Capital Solutions, Katrina King.

Managing policies and practices 

QIC's People and Culture Committee considers matters relating to human resource management policies and practices, including employee remuneration, performance management, organisational structure, and design and succession planning at the senior executive level and for other business-critical roles.

Performance and reward

The key feature of QIC's performance-based reward framework is that performance payments are linked to investment outcomes and profitability, as well as to the individual's contribution to defined goals which reflect stretch targets.  This includes ESG related goals for teams and individuals who play a leading part in delivering our ESG strategy.

To measure individual contribution, a formal Performance Management Program (PMP) exists for all employees which sets out processes for planning, communicating, monitoring and reviewing an employee's or team's performance and work-related behaviour. Performance related conversations happen regularly throughout the year and culminate in a formal annual review for all employees.

Ongoing assessment and approval of remuneration

The People and Culture Committee advises the Board on appropriate levels of employee remuneration after conducting an annual review of corporate and individual performance and considering industry comparisons and independent advice. The Board then determines the remuneration of the CEO. An Employment and Industrial Relations Plan is approved annually by QIC’s shareholding Ministers as part of the SCI development process. This plan outlines people priorities and areas of emphasis for the coming year.

Global senior leaders forum

QIC’s Global senior leaders forum (GSLF) was established in 2023 to create connection and enable the future success of QIC by fostering collaboration, knowledge-sharing and networking among our senior leaders and executive committee. 

The GSLF meets quarterly for a virtual business and financial update with Kylie Rampa, Chief Executive Officer, and Claire Blake, Chief Financial & Operating Officer, and other representatives as required.  Select GSLF members also participate in various enterprise initiatives including the ‘QIC Unpacked Series’ to educate employees about the business, and as mentors for QIC’s Young Professionals Network.

In 2024, the GSLF is undertaking a collective leadership capability uplift through a bespoke senior leadership program involving 360 assessments, group coaching and an enterprise simulation experience.

Real Estate senior leadership team 

Through FY24, QIC Real Estate’s senior leadership team continued to play a crucial role in driving Real Estate’s strategy, which encompasses elements such as gender diversity and cultural alignment.

The senior leadership team is a passionate group of 49 experienced professionals who each bring their diverse experience and skillset across the property sector to collaborate as a high-performing cohort. This team is brought together at offsites twice a year where they align on key organisational values to champion and cascade throughout the wider QIC Real Estate team. The senior leadership team also connects each month to share key updates on business achievements and how we are measuring against our strategic goals.

The concept of Culture Ambassadors was established to identify and implement changes to help improve Real Estate’s culture as an early outcome of the senior leadership team. The Culture Ambassadors play a significant role in leading, influencing and shaping our culture and gender initiatives.

In FY24, the Culture Ambassadors, in conjunction with the senior leadership team delivered a number of actions through the Culture Plan including;

• Work from home / hybrid work practices have been tailored across all teams to best optimise individual team culture and performance (moving away from a 60/40 split across the business to a tailored approach for each team).
• Proactive approach universally adopted to increase opportunities for social connection through reigniting quarterly drinks (broader QIC team), establishment of the Asset Creation & Investment Management (AC&IM) social committee and cross-team gatherings coordinated for various milestones (e.g. EOFY, team member farewells).
• Coffee roulette rolled out across QLD, NSW and VIC offices 

The senior leadership team continues to have a strong focus on inclusion, equity, and diversity, and delivered a number of actions through the Gender Plan to support this including:

• Standard set of gender metrics and lead indicators shared with executive team and senior leadership team each quarter
• Where possible, extend the Panel Pledge to include internal speaking and presentation opportunities
• A continued focus on gender balance during recruitment, including gender balance shortlists and gender diverse interviewing panels.

Shopping centre management mentoring program

This year, we partnered with Savills to deliver the 2024 Shopping Centre Management Mentoring Program, which supported 17 mentor-mentee relationships. The mentee cohort was made up of centre management team members employed by Savills, with senior QIC employees making up the group of mentors.

The program provides the opportunity for QIC Real Estate team members to create further avenues for growth.

Building a culture of thriving shopping centre teams

This year, QIC Real Estate continued our engagement with an external consultancy, Bendelta, to partner with shopping centre teams to co-create phase two of the Building a Culture of Thriving Shopping Centre Teams Program, to ensure Shopping Centre teams continued to draw on the program’s learnings and to provide ongoing support for the shopping centre teams. The program is designed to support the teams’ wellbeing and performance and involved QIC and Savills shopping centre employees.

Phase two of the program included a series of stand-alone three-hour face-to-face workshops focused on deepening an understanding and application of Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), enhancing individual and collective wellbeing (both within and across the shopping centre teams) and preventing burnout to build a culture for thriving shopping centre teams.

New employees who had not completed phase one of the program were invited to attend a one-hour HBDI group debrief workshop to introduce and interpret the HBDI profile for each participant and support them to build an understanding of their profile for application in their daily environment. This workshop also provided an overview of phase one, to ensure that all participants had a level of understanding and awareness of the need to support their individual wellbeing and create the conditions to support the wellbeing of their centre team.

Each component of the program focussed on building self-awareness and supporting individuals to create psychologically safe environments for the shopping centre teams to thrive. Practical tools and techniques were also shared to equip individuals for on-the job success and sustainability.

Professional development

QIC recognises that our people deliver our success, therefore we need to set our people up for success through professional development opportunities. Investing in the growth and development of our people is one of our key employee benefits and career development is a key part of our employee value proposition.

Our goal is to deliver a contemporary learning and development offering to ensure our people have the capabilities to deliver exceptional outcomes for QIC now and into the future. We aspire to a culture of continuous learning with proactive employees participating in knowledge and capability building and sharing.

We provide a number of in-house, online and externally delivered professional development offerings, working with referred and best practice providers. These programs continue to expand as the needs of the business evolve and some include:

• Everyday Inclusion Workshop (previously known as Inclusive Leadership Workshop)
• QIC Leadership Excellence Program
• Supporting Mental Health at Work
• Brand You Workshop
• Communicating with Influence
• Service Excellence Program
• Negotiation Skills
• Writing with Impact Workshop
• Foundational Finance Workshop
• Introduction to Financial Modelling
• Unit Pricing 101 Workshop
• Towards a Mentally Healthy Culture at QIC
• Building a Culture of Thriving Shopping Centre Teams.

QIC also provides every employee with access to virtual self-paced learning through LinkedIn Learning and virtual facilitated learning through Coursera and ICML, as employee benefits to advocate continuous learning.

A breakdown of training undertaken by QIC Real Estate employees in FY24 is provided in the table below:

Table 15: QIC Real Estate training

Being a leader

QIC went through a thorough process in 2023 to assess their leadership development provider. QIC subsequently selected BTS as the new provider and spent the first six months of 2024 in deep consultation and design with QIC business leaders and BTS to develop two senior leadership programs for QIC as the first priorities. These are:

• Being a Leader Program – this is for the circa 220 frontline people leaders/middle managers in QIC. This is a trademarked program of BTS’ that they have run for many international clients.
• Elevate Program – this is for the circa 100 global senior leaders at QIC.

To achieve a leadership capability uplift at QIC as quickly as possible, QIC have committed to put all 320 leaders through their leadership development program in FY25.

Flexibility

QIC embraces flexible working for all our people, which is brought to life through each person's unique circumstances. At QIC we trust, empower, and support our people through flexible working principles. In return, and through individual accountability and strong leadership, this trust and commitment is mutual – as measured through strong individual and collective performance.

QIC implemented a refreshed approach to flexible working in 2023 and this approach has continued throughout 2024. Flexible working means having flexibility in how, when or where our people work, and all QIC employees have access to a hybrid working model.

QIC also offers formalised access to flexible working arrangements and benefits for all employees to support them in balancing their work and home lives, with options including but not limited to compressed work weeks, part-time arrangements, variable working hours, paid parental leave for primary and non-primary carers (non-gendered), an additional week of carer's leave, and purchasing extra annual leave.

Employee Assistance Program

QIC recognises that employees may require additional support to help them manage personal and work pressures at various times and to assist with this, QIC offers an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) which provides confidential short-term personal counselling to all employees and their immediate family members.

Outplacement support

QIC employs an outplacement services provider to help facilitate career transitioning and employability following instances of contract termination or redundancies.

At QIC Real Estate, our people are central to our achievements. We prioritize creating a safe and secure space for all employees and anyone associated with our company.

The QIC’s Workplace Health & Safety (WHS) team plays an essential role in our operations, having had a notable year of activity. Below are some main initiatives and areas of focus for the reporting period:

WHS Management and reporting within QIC Real Estate

Throughout FY24, the QIC Real Estate WHS and Wellbeing Subcommittee maintained its schedule of meetings. The committee, comprising a diverse group ranging from senior leaders to centre management teams, is dedicated to devising initiatives that tackle workplace health and safety (WHS) concerns and risks. These issues are frequently identified through different data points, including incident reports and on-site inspections. Updates on our WHS accomplishments are presented every quarter to the Executive Committee of QIC Real Estate.

Work Health & Safety Management System

QIC's Workplace Health and Safety Management System (WHSMS) is currently undergoing a structured review process. New standards and forms have been introduced to enhance operational procedures. A WHS manual is in development and will be deployed in phases to promote adoption by the centre teams.

The inaugural frontline WHS audit and assurance program commenced in the second quarter of FY24, aimed at assessing adherence to the QIC WHSMS protocols. All observations and subsequent measures are being documented within the WHS software system

Technology supporting safety outcomes

QIC Real Estate has maintained and augmented the software used to document WHS incidents, hazards, contractor compliance, risk assessments, learning activities, tasks, and workplace inspections.

In the FY24, QIC Real Estate enhanced its contractor pre-qualification procedures by engaging a specialized external service provider. This modification has led to beneficial results in managing contractors for the business.

Psychological safety

To advance mental health awareness, QIC Real Estate consistently employs the services of a crisis management provider after incidents to offer support to centre staff, retailers, and customers. QIC also delivers training on health and wellbeing awareness, including webinars led by expert clinical psychologists.

For FY24, QIC Real Estate engaged an external service provider to conduct psychosocial risk assessments across the shopping centre portfolio, reaffirming its dedication to the mental health and wellbeing of its employees.