University Report: BHP's People, Culture, and Contemporary Leadership

This report examines BHP's human resource practices, focusing on performance, culture, and employee engagement initiatives. It analyzes the company's strategies to enhance employee motivation through competitive remuneration, training and development, and a safe work environment. The report highlights BHP's value-based culture, inclusive policies, and commitment to diversity and gender equality. It also explores the company's flexible work arrangements and community engagement efforts to improve employee engagement. The report concludes that BHP has invested significantly in creating a high-performance organization through various initiatives that contribute to its success.

Running head: PEOPLE, CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP
People, Culture and Contemporary Leadership
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Analysis......................................................................................................................................2
Performance related Initiatives..............................................................................................2
Culture Related Initiatives......................................................................................................4
Engagement Related Initiatives..............................................................................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
Broken hill propriety limited is a resource producing company. They are mining
based industry who process minerals, oil and natural gas. They have more than 70,000
employees as well as contractors who work with them to reach their goals. Their main centers
are located in Australia and some in America (BHP Annual Report 2018. 2018). They are a
B2B Company and sells throughout the world. Their mission is to align people and resources
so that effective and sustainable resource utilization can be achieved. The organization is
leader-based organization that develop their corporate culture and strategy to enable
leadership approach. An organization this big requires effective and efficient human resource
management for channeling the employee potential. The company has engaged in various
strategies and governance method in order to increase the performance of the employees,
improve organizational culture and improve employee engagement to the organization. This
report, explores the performance initiatives, culture initiatives and the engagement initiatives
as employed by the company.
Analysis
Performance related Initiatives
According to the Broken hill propriety limited (BHP) annual report, the company
takes the performance of the workforce very seriously. They have an extremely effective
policy, which is effective in increasing the motivation of the employees. Their policy is to
invest in their workforce in different aspects and departments so that they receive a
supportive and healthy workplace. They have a motivational policy, which revolves around
the competitive remuneration system. The employees are rewarded for their exceptional
contribution to realization of the organizational goals, fulfilling the strategies that they take

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for the business and their contribution to long-term achievements and heavily penalized for
misconduct (Baldwin and Williams 2019). They believe in in training and development of the
leaders through seminars, workshops and training. They also train the basic workforce so that
their skills increase and they are able to support the leaders. The training and development is
an essential part of the organizations initiative to increase performance. For example, the
company had arranged for a workshop where 40 managers from around the globe were
invited. The workshop was intended to train them with complex problem solving capabilities
that emerge in competitive business world. The workshop included both technical and
professional training that gave the managers a perspective on how to run a diverse, safe,
effective as well as efficient organizational operation. The company intends to carry on this
initiative and include more and more managers and execut8ves into the program.
Broken hill propriety limited (BHP) is a mining company and thus, the safety and
security of the workforce is of first precedence. The company ensures that the workers
receive a risk free work environment. Moreover, they conduct continuous risk assessment in
order to understand the potential risks that may arise. The workforce employed in the job are
vulnerable to daily sprain and strain which they are trying to mitigate using the Field
Leadership Engagement and awareness. Explaining the workers about the safety issues and
training them with safety procedure helps them keep the workers healthy and increase their
performance (MINING.COM 2019). The workforce also enjoys extended health insurance
and benefits in case of health conditions appearing from hazardous elements. They are also
reducing the recordable injury frequency for minor injuries as well as the fatal injuries. The
employee occupational illnesses are also covered through insurances and benefits so that
workers working in the company are able to inspire people to give their best performance.
The measurement for success in this aspect is dine through yearly measurement of recordable
injury frequency measurement and recorded high potential injury events. The improvement in

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occupational health is calculated each year and the difference is measured based on previous
year’s performance.
Culture Related Initiatives
BHP has a value-based culture in the organization. as people lie at the heart of their
organizational culture, their focus remains in investing on people in different layers. In order
to create positive organizational culture they have developed detailed people policies and an
inclusive approach. Their comprehensive and detailed policy creates the framework for
organizational culture. The company has a charter. The charter contains the purpose, values
and objectives of the organization. It also contains the guidelines about measuring success,
who they are, what they do and what the organization believes. A well-formed Code of
Conduct that gives clear guidelines about how they apply their commitments that are
included in the charter. In order to maintain the code of conduct, the company consults a
advisory board and dispute and grievances handling department to detect and identify any
breach in the code. They also have requirement standards that outlines the minimum
expectations of practices for working with and for the company. The minimum requirement
standards include fair labor policy, recruitment, retention policy, and corporate responsibility.
The inclusive cultural policy includes diversity policy, gender equality and LGBTQ+
inclusion. Their diversity policy focuses on promoting safety, productivity and wellbeing.
Their employment and development policy is based on talent management and prohibits
discriminations on any grounds. Bullying or harassment is also prohibited in order to create a
positive organizational culture (Kelley 2019). The organization is built on fair treatment
policy. The organization has also taken a pledge to achieve complete gender equality by
2025. Mining is a male dominated industry due to the heavy nature of the industry. The
company has achieved 22.4% female representation in the year 2018. In external hiring, the

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company has achieved almost 40% of women recruitment. The company also includes people
from LGBTQ+ community and campaigns against bias and workplace harassment if the
sexual minorities. This kind of inclusive and sustainable developmental policy creates the
standard of behavior inside and outside the company, thus creating a positive work culture.
Engagement Related Initiatives
The company realizes that flexibility is the key to success for every organization. It is
mostly believed that flexible work culture is meant only for back office or desk jobs. The
company has taken initiative to introduce flexible shift timing, job sharing arrangements and
break arrangements for onsite employees (BHP. 2019). It has been seen that this has
increased the employee engagement at work and thus has contributed to the performance of
the company. The company also recognizes the need to attract new employee pool and this
engages in promotional and discussion events so that new potentials remain interested in
joining the companies. The company also takes a community based engagement policy. The
company includes the members of the local community in order to ensure their engagement
in the work. The reason behind this is twofold the local communities have far greater idea
about the local lands than others do and the second is that they are the most affected due to
the large projects. By providing them with employment opportunities, both the organization
and the people of the community are benefitted.
The nature of the job is very challenging and physically taxing, thus many of the
employees might feel disengaged with their job. Mining industry has high turnover rate, as
employees also are prone to health and safety issues. A very effective method for employee
engagement that BHP follows is the training and development policy. The company gives
training on different genre, which gives the employees confidence to do their job. The
recruitment policy is fair and so is the remuneration policy. The initiatives to mental wellness

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is also an important part. The contracts are important part of employee relations and the
company follows all the rules and regulations related to fair labor. The benefits and
employment conditions that employees receive for their commitment to organization are at
the core of employee engagement. Work life balance is an essential aspect for employee
engagement and the flexible work schedule that the company has initiated proved to be a
successful venture. Already, the employees of Queensland showed remarkable improvement
in diversity and inclusive behavior, cost effectiveness and enhanced performance. The
company provides a job share register through which employees can find other crewmembers
who are interested in job sharing. The result can be seen in the two employees, Billy and
David, who had shared jobs for six months with great success. They brought a positive
energy with them, which also motivated other people.
Conclusion
From the above discussion it is to be concluded that the company BHP, has taken
many initiatives for the betterment of their employees. The very first step that they took a
motivational policy, which revolves around the competitive remuneration system. They also
believe in training and development of the leaders through seminars, workshops and training
as well as training of the basic workforce. Due to the hazardous nature of the employees, the
employees enjoy health and safety insurance against illnesses and injuries. The company
continuously implements security measures to ensure that the employees are in a safe
workplace. They also have a open and fair organizational culture. Their inclusive cultural
policy includes diversity policy, gender equality and LGBTQ+ inclusion. For employee
engagement, they have flexible work shifts, job sharing and community involvement so that
best performance of the employees can be achieved. Thus, the company has invested

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significantly for creating a high performance organization, which has led them to their
position today.

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References
Baldwin, M. and Williams, S. 2019. Christmas is not known as the silly season by accident.
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accident/?utm_source=Mondaq&utm_medium=syndication&utm_campaign=View-Original
[Accessed 12 Dec. 2019].
BHP Annual Report 2018. 2018. [pdf] BHP. Available at:
https://www.bhp.com/-/media/documents/investors/annual-reports/2018/
bhpannualreport2018.pdf [Accessed 12 Dec. 2019].
BHP. 2019. Our approach | BHP. [online] Available at:
https://www.bhp.com/community/our-approach [Accessed 12 Dec. 2019].
Kelley, M. 2019. how to avoid ending up on Santa’s naughty list this Christmas party season
| Lexology. [online] Lexology.com. Available at:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1cb52986-99fc-42c4-97d3-36a20c02b8d7
[Accessed 12 Dec. 2019].
MINING.COM. 2019. BHP names Mike Henry as new CEO. [online] Available at:
https://www.mining.com/bhp-names-mike-henry-as-new-ceo/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2019].