A united purpose for Unitywater and Anna Jackson

Collaboration, innovation and sustainability drive growth, ensuring reliable services and thriving communities in one of Australia’s fastest-growing regions.

From the organisation’s new southern base at Mango Hill, Unitywater CEO Anna Jackson looks out toward Brisbane City to the left and the Glasshouse Mountains to the right.

“We are so lucky to live and work in such a beautiful part of the world,” Jackson said. “With many others now wanting their holiday destination of choice to become their day-to-day lifestyle setting, it’s one of Australia’s fastest growing regions.”

Unitywater currently provides water and wastewater services to over 800,000 people. Over the next 20 years, this figure is forecast to increase by 65 per cent to more than 1.3 million residents.

“At Unitywater, our purpose is to be here for healthy and thriving communities,” Jackson said. “We need to serve our customers of today, protect the beautiful landscapes and lifestyle we all enjoy, and plan sustainably and responsibly for what we hand over to our customers of tomorrow – from the health of our environment to the reliability of our essential services and their affordability.

“Joining Unitywater, I found a business that was ready to leverage its strong operational base and committed team through a growth phase while positively impacting our operating environment and its communities.”

Strategic ambition

Last year, after consulting customers, team members and stakeholders, Unitywater outlined its 2030 Strategic Ambition. It is aligned around four strategic themes – value every drop, customer of the future, keep it simple, and one Unitywater. The 2030 Strategic Ambition guides the team to shape healthy and thriving communities.

“The strategy is an ambition for our organisation towards becoming a mature, transformed business with a leadership role in the communities we serve,” Jackson said. “Our goal is to meet growth challenges head-on while working towards net zero targets and meeting the community’s expectations, now and into the future. Realising this shift, while meeting the needs of a growing region, means we need additional talented and motivated working people working within and alongside our business.”

Changing workforce

Unitywater needed to better meet market demand, as it competed for this talent against large multinational corporations based in Brisbane and navigated the changed workplace flexibility expectations of a post-pandemic employment market.

“Millennials are the largest cohort in the working population, including the water sector,” said Jackson. “They are less likely to stay in one role, with more emphasis on development and work-life balance over financial reward. Around this time, news reports and conversations with other organisations were confirming that mandated office attendance ratios were impacting culture and talent attraction.”

Towards the end of 2023, 87 per cent of Australian businesses were reported to have introduced mandates – four days a week being the most common – and 31 per cent had lost employees because of them.

Working better together

“In this context, we developed our Working Better Together principles to give our teams a framework to locally design and manage their normal work patterns,” Jackson said. “It allowed us to balance our specific operational requirements with their internal and external customer needs and personal preferences.

“To start, we acknowledged that as a 24/7 essential service, there are some roles that can’t be performed flexibly, and we were also clear that no one works from home all the time because we consider face-to-face contact integral to our strong organisational culture.

“We then gave guidance on the moments and activities that can work remotely, which are better in-person and those that are expected in-person.

“Each team built a charter that defines how this works for them and their expectations of each other – from valuing time spent together, to which of our work locations they attend – and provides a mechanism for leaders to ensure their people are working safely.”

Adjusting for new work practices

Balancing traditional business thinking and contemporary employee expectations has been critical to recruitment and retention. Unitywater reports that 100 per cent of candidates ask about flexible arrangements, and around 40 per cent say they would decline a role if mandated significant office attendance.

The utility’s turnover is down to 12 per cent, compared to the national average of 15 per cent. Cultural outcomes also look positive, with team involvement measures lifting 7.6 per cent halfway through the implementation process.

Work180 also recently recognized employment practices, ranking Unitywater as its number one employer for gender pay equity. Similarly, BenchmarCX certified it as a Triple R employer implementing responsive and respectful recruitment.

“We believe that we are better together and that when we share space, we increase creativity and collaboration,” Jackson said. “Physical workspaces must support this way of working, so in May, we moved our Southern Corporate Centre from Caboolture to Mango Hill, a location central to transport and closer to home for more of our future team and customers. We reconsidered our traditional ways of working and aligned ourselves with an activity-based, technology-supported hybrid model that maximises the geography of our service area.”

The location and modern fit-out at the new Mango Hill office have seen daily occupancy levels regularly exceed 80 per cent. In comparison, the team-defined working patterns have lifted total real estate utilisation across all Unitywater sites by 21 per cent per square meter.

Building for the future

These numbers will increase as Unitywater’s new long-term capital delivery partners start working alongside their team to Build Better Together.

Earlier in the year, the business signed initial five-year framework agreements with Downer, Dormway and Elevate (a joint venture of Aurecon and AECOM) to streamline the capital delivery process and support a significant growth era.

“We can see the influence population growth has on our capital program, with 70 per cent of projects this year being growth-related, up from an average of 30 per cent over the past three years,” Jackson said.

“Our partners will support us in delivering our $1.8 billion capital investment program over the next five years to secure reliable water services for our growing customer base.

“We’re mitigating the impact of external factors like tight labour markets and booming infrastructure programs nationwide by ensuring our partners will be ready to work on our projects, meaning certainty and reliability for program delivery.”

With 88 per cent of Unitywater’s team members living within the region they serve, their sense of working together extends to their community.

“Whether it’s the way we work as a core team, the way we partner to extend our team or the way we share common experiences with our customers and communities, it’s always going to be better when we do it together.”

For more information, visit unitywater.com