In AMP’s annual report released on Wednesday, the group’s chair Debra Hazelton said an external review of its workplace culture conducted by consultancy firm Symmetra late last year had “pleasingly found that AMP does not have a systemic issue with regard to sexual harassment or misconduct in our workplace”.
But Ms Hazelton – who was appointed in August after previous chair David Murray resigned following his handling of allegations against former AMP Capital head Boe Pahari – said the review had identified “some key improvement areas to meet global best practice standards”.
“The board stands firm with our CEO Francesco De Ferrari in his continued prioritisation of this important work,” she said.
Announcing AMP’s results last month, Mr De Ferrari said the group’s work on internal culture was “underpinning a lot of the work on the strategy and business portfolios”.
“Transforming our culture has always been part of our strategy, but we accelerated our activity in the second half of last year,” he said.
“Inclusion has been one of the major focuses, with training for all our senior leaders which we aim to roll out further this year to the whole employee base.”
According to AMP’s sustainability report for the 2020 financial year, the workplace conduct review had assessed the group’s policies, processes and frameworks and historical case data, as well as conducting one-on-one interviews, a broad survey and focus groups with employees.
The inquiry assessed AMP’s performance against five “best practice pillars” – reporting and measurement, inclusive leadership, internal capability, confidentiality and transparency, and policy and process.
“AMP was found to be ‘mid-range’ overall on these pillars,” the group said.
AMP said it had “already implemented a range of actions in 2020” in response to the review and concerns around workplace culture, which would “inform further actions for 2021”.
Actions already implemented included updates to its code of conduct and consequence management policies, establishing a consequence management committee to “strengthen oversight of conduct breaches”, establishing an inclusion task force to advise on leadership appointments and setting new diversity targets.
AMP had also disclosed detailed data on misconduct allegations for the first time, noting there had been 172 “alleged misconduct cases” in the 2020 year.
Of these, 88 had been “substantiated” and 46 had been “serious misconduct breaches warranting remuneration and management action”. A further 24 cases had led to termination of the individuals involved.
AMP said 84 of the misconduct cases were “not substantiated”, meaning they may have been resolved informally between the individuals or withdrawn.
