INDICATORS

We've been measuring our social, environmental and economic performance across key indicators for over four years now. Our progress is summarised in this section.

Social

Customers

Our customer satisfaction index score for our largest business—home and motor insurance sold directly to our customers in Australia—remained ahead of the market at 84. Similarly, our customers in New Zealand indicated high levels of satisfaction, improving on last year's result with a score of 87%. Please see the glossary for an explanation of these indices.

Our businesses introduced a number of solutions for our customers to improve their own sustainability, including insurepink in the United Kingdom and 'green' insurance products in New Zealand.

Community

We are a member of the London Benchmarking Group and are beginning to define our community investment in accordance with their principles.

This is reflected in our community investment result, which incorporates the exclusion of corporate sponsorships in the last two years. Our Australian 2008 community investment profile is illustrated in the graph below.

Community sponsorships make up just over 50% of our community investment in Australia and include a wide range of initiatives such as the CareFlight, Communityhelp grants, and JumpStart.

Through our community investment we aim to facilitate true partnerships with our communities in line with our focus on risk reduction. We will continue to review and align our community investments in accordance with this.

Australia community investment
For the year ended 30 June 2008

Suppliers

While we include sustainability criteria in all of our suppliers' contracts, a formal performance review of their sustainability commitments is currently only undertaken with our strategic operational suppliers. We intend to commence reporting the percentage of our operational suppliers screened for sustainability next year for our Australian and New Zealand businesses.

We have thousands of suppliers who provide products and services for our customers' claims. These range from small autobody repairer shops to large corporates. Developing a supplier screening process for this group is a key challenge and one that we are investigating.

Workforce

Many of our employee indicators remained stable and we acknowledge that work and investment must continue to build a motivated, engaged and high performing culture, operating in a safe working environment.

Our refined corporate strategy this year also means we have rationalised the number of employee and executive roles across our Australian business. Where possible this has been accomplished through natural attrition and redeployment, but in some cases there have been redundancies. This is necessary to ensure the business can improve its performance. Throughout this process, we have followed procedures to ensure employees are treated fairly and ensure minimal impact to the teams who service our customers.

We are pleased to see more women are moving into senior management positions and are proud of the fact that 60% of our employees are women. We were recognised for the fourth year as an Employer of Choice for Women by the Australian Equal Opportunities for Women in the Workplace Agency.

Women in senior management positions (%)

Our flexible workplace initiative has helped our employees to maintain their work life balance. This year we enhanced our Working from Home program so that our call centre employees now have flexible work options.

BACK TO TOP

Environmental

Australia and New Zealand CO2e emissions profile
For the year ended 30 June 2008

Our CO²e emissions from electricity consumption account for 76% of our total emissions profile. This is because electricity production in Australia is primarily fuelled by coal, which when combusted, produces a large amount of greenhouse gases. Much of New Zealand's electricity is generated from renewable resources and has enabled our New Zealand business to select a supplier that provides energy from 100% renewable resources.

Despite our measures to improve the energy efficiency of the buildings we occupy in Australia this year, our electricity consumption has increased. This is primarily because of an increase in electricity used at our head office at 388 George Street, Sydney since August 2007. The reason for this increase is unclear but we have sought verification of the electricity data with our electricity manager and we are also investigating whether the cause could be due to an obligation under IAG's sub lease of this building to another tenant who required ongoing after hours air conditioning to be activated this year.

We have significantly reduced our air travel this year, with our Australian business making a 27% reduction and our New Zealand business an impressive 39% reduction. Our revised air travel approval process facilitated greater rationalisation of trips, which supported this reduction.

Our Australian 2008 trade fleet fuel result has been expanded to reflect consumption from all fuel sources. In previous years we have reported on our petrol consumption only and this year we have also included our tool of trade LPG and diesel consumption as well.

Office paper consumption in both Australia and New Zealand has reduced this year. In Australia this has been due to a continued transition to default duplex print multi function printing equipment. New Zealand's implementation of a new staff environmental program Every Step Counts has enabled their employees to become more conscious of their paper use.

We use recycled paper where possible in our operations. In Australia this year, recycled paper made up 11% of our total print paper use and 27% of our total office paper use. We will investigate measuring our New Zealand results next year.

We have increased our recycling this year in Australia and our result reflects the inclusion of new suppliers and recycling types such as our printer toner cartridge recycling with Planet Ark.

In accordance with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, we have begun to review the scope of the greenhouse gas emissions we report on. We are also investigating measuring our water consumption and landfill waste and aim to begin reporting on our Australian business performance against these indicators next year.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Profile—for the year ended 30 June 2008

Economic

A five year summary of our financial performance and commentary on our economic performance and direction can be viewed in IAG's 2008 annual review.

BACK TO TOP