COVID-19 and the changing retail and consumer landscape have presented both sudden and gradual disruptions to Vicinity’s ways of working or operating model. Additionally, these disruptions are underpinning a shift in the role shopping centres play within our communities and forcing us to quickly respond with innovative ways to protect our existing business by building new revenue streams. Equipping our leaders with the skills to respond to these changes has been a critical and ongoing focus in FY21. This evolving external context also presents a significant opportunity for Vicinity to evolve and strengthen. By adapting our ways of working, leveraging our assets and capabilities differently and embracing the changing retail landscape we will be better positioned to address current business challenges and deliver long-term, sustainable performance and growth.

In FY21, we embarked on a systemic change program designed to deliver an enhanced operating model. Titled The Vicinity Way, this multi-year program is intended to drive cultural change, enhance capability of our people, increase execution velocity and deliver increased commercial performance over time. More specifically, The Vicinity Way embeds adaptive ways of thinking and growth mindsets while also driving cohesion across the business. These new ways of working augment our existing organisational strength in retail property management. The Vicinity Way has strong engagement with Vicinity’s Executive and Senior Leadership teams.

Critical to developing and sustaining a culture of high performance is having the leadership capability and discipline to consciously listen and build authentic, two-way communication. This two-way communication must also foster trust and psychological safety. 

In November 2020, we launched our inaugural employee experience survey, which is central to our continuous listening methodology. In addition to measuring employee experience, the survey provides a means for our people leaders to listen to, and act on, the collective feedback from their teams. Our employee experience survey results demonstrated that our team members remained focused on delivering results for our retailers and our business despite the disruption 2020 brought. They saw alignment between their role and Vicinity’s purpose, felt empowered to act, knew how to be successful in their role and felt appropriately involved in decisions that affect their jobs.

Our values encapsulate the mindsets and behaviours critical to enabling a culture of high performance.

Our values are part of who we are and are intrinsic to our success. They come to life through the actions we take, the decisions we make, the lessons we learn and the stories we share.  We support this by creating a work environment where everyone can be themselves and are empowered and encouraged to make a difference, at work and in the communities in which we operate.

Throughout FY21, our people continued to display high levels of dedication, commitment and resilience while living and breathing our organisational values. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted all our people in a variety of different ways and Vicinity’s response throughout was consistently ‘people first’, the positive impact of which was demonstrated with our team members rating ‘company confidence’ at 87% and 85% in our July 2020 and October 2020 COVID-19 pulse check surveys.

As part of the Vicinity Way, we are continually shaping our organisation to ensure we are well placed to deliver our strategy and respond to an evolving retail and economic landscape.

In FY21, we hired 228 new team members at Vicinity and as at 30 June 2021, we have 1,235 Vicinity team members. 46 per cent of our people leaders are female, as is 40 per cent of our Executive Team. In FY21, our employee absenteeism rate was 1.43%.

Our people statistics in FY21

To see more detailed data on our people, download our FY21 Performance Pack.