Our people, our greatest asset

The success of a business starts with its people.

A team that’s aligned in its purpose and values, working together towards a common and shared goal can achieve tremendous outcomes. I’ve seen it throughout my career, where I’ve been lucky enough to lead several high performing businesses, and I’m seeing evidence of that happening now at InfraBuild.

Despite the challenges of ongoing wet weather impacting the eastern Australian states in particular, continuing labour and supply chain issues related to COVID, and geo-political instability, the InfraBuild team are achieving an amazing turnaround for the business.

It’s true the market conditions have been favourable, with high steel demand and scrap prices, but on the other side there’s been commodity conditions working against us, along with fuel related transport costs, and the earlier mentioned external factors of which we have no control.

For a business that’s been operating continuously for more than 100 years, resilience is really part of our organisational DNA. Our people show their mettle every day and I’m very proud of their efforts to make a difference to customers, the communities in which we operate and ultimately the nations we help build and shape through key infrastructure projects – from hospitals, to highways, bridges to office blocks.

Engaged team and strong culture

We’ve recently completed our employee engagement survey and achieved a record participation rate – a sign that something good is underway here.

Ninety per cent of our people shared their views on what is working well, and areas we need to look at and change. Importantly, while the participation rate has increased significantly, our high engagement rate has been maintained – evidenced by the 32,000-plus comments they’ve provided, many made to me individually of which I have read all and am in the process of responding.

It’s clear our people care and take pride in their sites, the equipment and tools they need to do their job well, their interest in our capital investments and the direction of the company.

Throughout FY22, we’ve made purposeful and strategic capital investment - to the value of about $46 million year-to-date - back in the business to help unlock and enable further value creation and production. This is part of our focus on capital discipline, examining each business case on its merits but in the context of the overall business.

Importantly, those capital cases and projects bubble up from our teams and sites at the frontline. They reflect the long-term thinking our people apply when considering what they need to continue to improve and deliver value for our customers.

Safer workplaces

We want all our people, customers and suppliers to go home safe at the end of each day. It’s the bedrock of our WRIB Safe Way roadmap for world-class safety excellence.

We are on a journey but making strong headway.

Q3 FY22 ended with the best quarterly Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR) ever recorded for InfraBuild at 5.1. Year-to-date (YTD), our safety performance, measured by the TRIFR metric, is 22% better than FY21.

Increased proactive reporting of unsafe conditions and the rollout of an internal safety training program, empowering our people to intervene to ensure safety, is making a difference.

We have much more to do in this regard, as one injury is one too many – but we’re heading in the right direction.

Stronger performance

The correlation between companies that have an improved safety performance, and financial performance is well known.

So it’s really no surprise that we are seeing the strong performance of InfraBuild continuing throughout FY22.

We recently published our Q3 results that showed our FY22 record performance is continuing.

Our YTD net revenue of A$4.3 billion is up 32 per cent, while EBITDA is up a whopping 87 per cent.

The numbers are good and there’s more to come through Q4, but what I’m most proud of is the way our people have demonstrated their grit and ability to pull together as a united team.

In partnership with our customers, suppliers and the communities in which we operate – around the world – our people are bringing InfraBuild’s Good to Great strategy to life each and every day.

Regards,
Vik

Vik Bansal
CEO and Managing Director InfraBuild