People and health and safety
Recruitment challenges The tight labour market across New Zealand has continued, and Vector has faced similar challenges to other businesses. Despite borders opening up in July 2022, strict immigration criteria remained in place impacting the ability to recruit offshore candidates. More recently, a softening of the criteria and Vector’s accredited employer status have facilitated hires from overseas into critical roles, where no suitable New Zealand-based applicants were found. Candidates are still difficult to source in technology, engineering, transport and the trades, and competition is fierce with applicants often involved in multiple recruitment processes. One of the biggest challenges has been in OnGas, where drivers are in high demand across the country. In addition to the adoption of class 1 delivery trucks to expand the pool of potential drivers, first introduced in the last financial year, we’ve responded further by working closely with employees
and the management team to understand and address attraction and retention strategies. This has culminated in pay increases to meet the market, retention payments, shifting from fortnightly to weekly pay to reduce financial pressure and the introduction of cadet schemes to create entry-level jobs for youth and career pathways. Work was also undertaken to refresh the way we advertised our roles and positioned ourselves to appeal to the target audience. The result saw applications more than double and led to record low vacancies. Health, safety and environment To track our progress against our safety goals, Vector continues to measure safety performance across the group, including Lost-Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR), Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR), and severity rate. In the past year, we have experienced an increase in sprains and strains within our field workforce, which has seen our LTIFR increase. Our
focus remains on injury reduction, and there has been a decrease in the severity rate of lost time injuries, indicating that the severity and average number of days required off work per incident has reduced across FY23. Our TRIFR rate remains steady. Our health and safety approach across the Vector group is centred on a culture of openness, curiosity and continuous learning to drive a safer and healthier workplace for our people. This culture encourages members, both in the office and in the field, to actively participate and input into the risk management system as opposed to taking a view of ‘arbitrary compliance’, which does not encourage engagement and continuous improvement. It is through this approach that we continue to prioritise robust and thorough incident investigations into high potential near miss events, reviews into key operational activities, and focused health, safety and environmental assurance activities with our field services partners.
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Vector Annual Report 2023
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