Macquarie is focused on creating a diverse and inclusive environment that brings to life our purpose: Empowering people to innovate and invest for a better future. By providing a Family Friendly Workplace, we support our parents and carers to bring their whole self to work and deliver on this purpose.
The diversity of our people is one of our greatest strengths and an inclusive workplace enables us to embrace diversity to deliver more innovative and sustainable solutions for our people, clients, shareholders, and communities. It enables our people to innovate, solve problems creatively, learn from mistakes and turn challenges into opportunities.
We’re committed to a family friendly workplace to enable our high performance culture, where all our people are empowered to deliver at their best. It allows us to continue to strengthen our culture and support for families, helping us to attract, develop and retain the best people.
We aim to ensure all our people have the tools and opportunities to build diverse and exciting careers that adapt and reflect the changes in their personal lives.
Parental Leave
We support our employees through their parental leave with benefits enabling them to successfully transition to life as a working parent on their return. We offer paid parental leave as well as varied initiatives such as childcare centres, back up child/adult/eldercare, nursing parents’ facilities and return to work coaching for parents.
Our parental leave provisions are gender neutral and include birth and adoption related leave, and also recognise same sex relationships. Subject to eligibility requirements, benefits include:
During and on return from parental leave, our employees can benefit from:
Families & Carers Employee Network Group
Our Employee Network Groups (ENGs) are voluntary, employee led groups that connect our people from across the business so they can share knowledge and insights with each other, the broader Macquarie population and with leadership to help inform our approach to creating an inclusive and supportive workplace. Our Families and Carers ENG empowers our people to be the best parents, carers and professionals they can be through tools, resources, raising awareness and engaging our people.
Flexible working
We empower all of our people to manage their professional and personal commitments and equip our people managers to lead a flexible workforce.
Because we recognise that working flexibly means different things to different people, flexible working at Macquarie exists in many forms, and can include changes to hours, locations and patterns of work, study and exam leave or leave without pay.
Wellbeing
Macquarie Plus is our holistic wellbeing program, designed to empower our people to become their best self, both at work and at home. Macquarie Plus delivers on four key elements:
Employee Listening
At Macquarie, we encourage our people to share their perspectives on our employee experience, benefits, and resources.
To facilitate this, we conduct formal and informal listening activities, including regular employee surveys to understand our population and provide insight into their experiences. Through these surveys we identify opportunities to uplift the employee experience.
Diversity & Inclusion strategy
Developed over many years and refreshed in 2020, our global diversity and inclusion strategy involves building a culture that supports diversity and inclusion across all our activities. It is focused on:
By sharing stories of our peoples’ experiences taking and returning from parental leave, we have seen an increase in the number of men taking parental leave for extended periods of time.
Our global return to work rate was 97% in FY2021 and high retention rates continue to be achieved for staff who have taken parental leave.
Our focus on family care, inclusive policies and practices, and flexible working has resulted in Macquarie being accredited as a Carer Friendly Employer by Carers + Employers.
Phuong Jordan leads Macquarie’s Melbourne-based Credit team from Adelaide. Phuong is a mother of two and in late 2020 relocated to Adelaide to provide care for her parents.
“I felt anxious about transitioning back to work after a year off post having my first baby. Speaking to a Parents at Work coach that was provided by Macquarie helped me to acknowledge the change in identity I was going through. They helped me set personal expectations and goals, to quiet personal doubts and to assess my work/family/life balance.”
“I felt much more in control returning from my second parental leave. I had used paid ‘keeping in touch’ days to join quarterly updates and maintain relationships with my key stakeholders. My manager and I used Macquarie’s Parental Leave Handbook to map out a return to work which gave me the time and space that I needed to re-orient myself with my team and the business. I found that using the resources that Macquarie made available to me as well as open conversations with my manager made a big difference.”
“Unfortunately, while I was planning my return to work my dad and then later my mum were hospitalised and I had to return to Adelaide to help care for them. Due to COVID, Macquarie had already adapted to a hybrid way of working and we formed an alternative work arrangement that allowed me to manage my team from Adelaide and return to Melbourne for important client and team interactions. I felt guilty and anxious returning to work while my parents needed me but speaking to a psychologist from our Employee Assistance Program helped me accept what it is, to reset, and to see going back to work as a positive experience. Macquarie’s support of flexible working and access to psychologists was a huge enabler for me to continue my career while balancing my caring responsibilities.”
"Macquarie is a people business, and the diversity of our people is one of our greatest strengths. Recognition as a family friendly workplace means an ongoing commitment to embed, measure and manage sustainable workplace practices that can help our staff balance both their work and family commitments, and feel empowered to thrive in their career at Macquarie. Families, no matter how you define them, deserve family friendly practices in the workplace. We're passionate about continuing to support families - not only for the positive impact on our business, but for the positive impact it can have on our society."
