Have you ever pinched yourself, wondering how did I land this perfect role? That's how I feel every day at Fujitsu as Head of Oceania's Office of Purpose. Yes, I know I'm still in my honeymoon period having joined just a short six months ago, but you know what? I can't imagine not feeling this way in the months and years ahead.
"Why?", you ask, is Nicole so passionate about this role? Well let me tell you, every role I've ever had before coming to Fujitsu helped lay the foundation and scaffold for success to deliver impact for the very broad Purpose remit in Fujitsu ANZ. Our global Purpose is 'to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation' and we practice this commitment through the delivery of three interconnected areas of work – sustainability, society, and inclusion.
Sustainability, Society and Inclusion
At Fujitsu ANZ, we are focused on improving our environmental sustainability through our commitment to drastically reduce our carbon footprint. We contribute to a fair and just society through social impact by being transparent about our performance against leading local and global indicators. We also have an ambitious vision for how we can better reflect the diversity of the communities in which we live.
Through this approach, we recognise the opportunities to address the complex and interconnected issues of sustainability and society through an inclusion lens to increase our positive impact for our people, customers, communities, and the planet.
To deliver impact, Fujitsu needs commitment from each and every one of our people to think beyond our immediate roles, and take a broader, more global and collaborative perspective on how we can share these values with our customers and communities. It's about connecting the dots, between our purpose and how we practically deliver our products and services, to achieve the biggest impact we can.
When we connect the dots back to our purpose, we can see the big picture and why it's important for our work to contribute to creating impact for our customers and the world alike. Fujitsu customers have ambitious inclusion, sustainability, and social impact objectives. These are goals that our customers' customers expect them to achieve. Our customers will need help to achieve them, and that's where Fujitsu comes in. When customers are looking to differentiate on something other than price, these shared values can create that difference.
Connecting the dots the Fujitsu way
Fujitsu ANZ is accelerating our journey to becoming an Employer of Choice, as we introduce new initiatives to become more inclusive to better attract top talent from diverse backgrounds. Since Graeme Beardsell became SVP, Head of ANZ, in November 2020, we have made some huge leaps forward, including:
- Following a pay equity review, we put in place remediation efforts and have now effectively removed the gender pay gap.
- Promoting and hiring women in leadership at pace, with 47% female representation in the new Executive Leadership Team composition.
- Partnering to expand the pipeline of female IT talent tomorrow, by investing in attracting more young females to STEM today.
- Attracting, supporting, and developing future First Nations talent by expanding education, governments, and community partnerships to increase early career pathways through internships, traineeships, and graduate programs.
While creating an inclusive culture for our people is key to success in retaining diverse talent, in ANZ we are connecting our Inclusion strategy to our social impact goals. We are creating more inclusive operating practices, by:
- Increasing diverse participation in the Fujitsu supply chain with new First Nations, women, and veteran owned businesses.
- Deploying a new e-procurement digital platform to streamline engagement of small and First Nations suppliers.
I understand it might not be easy for some to see the connection between creating an inclusive culture within our organisation and our commitment to decarbonisation, as well as our desire to contribute to a more fair and just society through supply chain diversification. So, let me share some examples of how we are doing just that.
Continuing our decarbonisation journey
A large part of Fujitsu ANZ’s carbon footprint comes from our data centre's electricity generation. As Fujitsu ANZ continues our decarbonisation journey, we look to increase our onsite renewable energy production. In an effort to connect our inclusion goals with our sustainability and social impact goals, we engaged Bunjil Energy, an Aboriginal business, to install a 100kW solar panel system at our Queensland data centre.
Solar panel installation at our 8 miles plain data centre
Volunteering leave
Fujitsu ANZ is also focused on increasing impact with our community partners through our new provision of three days annual paid volunteering leave. This leave is provided to our people to do skilled volunteering explicitly with community organisations that align with our diversity and inclusion focus areas. We have also recently aligned our community giving program to ensure it supports organisations that are aligned with our diversity and inclusion focus areas to maximise impact.
Giving back to the community
Fujitsu ANZ’s community giving program demonstrated its alignment to the health and disability inclusion focus areas when it supported Camp Quality to overcome pandemic-related challenges by digitally transforming its support to children and their families affected by a cancer diagnosis.
We developed a free, interactive Kids' Guide to Cancer app to help children and their families better navigate the various aspects of cancer. The app was developed by an expert global team following a collaborative, co-creation workshop in Fujitsu's Digital Transformation Centre in Sydney. The app provides age-appropriate information and interactivity including augmented reality, and lets users interact with Camp Quality in new ways that boost accessibility of support via greater digital inclusion.
These examples of how we consciously spend with suppliers and align our in-kind support for community organisations with our inclusion focus areas, tangibly demonstrate to our people, and to perspective talent, that inclusion, to Fujitsu ANZ, isn't just about identifying specific groups that do not have equitable access to economic participation and employment opportunities.
But rather, it shows that we are committed to practising our values of Aspiration, Trust and Empathy to deliver impact for a more inclusive and sustainable society through authentic, meaningful partnerships with communities and customers. In doing so, we can also make substantial and impactful contributions to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
It's being able to lead that kind of impact for Fujitsu ANZ’s Office of Purpose which makes me pinch myself every day.
