Spark’s Blue Heart KaupapaOur Blue Heart Kaupapa sets the standard of behaviour and the values we stand for, creating a culture of belonging. We are also currently participating in the Diverse Digitech 2040 Design kaupapa alongside Spark Foundation – an initiative focussed on creating employment pathways for Māori and Pasifika youth. We hope this will flow into the attraction of new talent, progression of diverse talent through the business, and further our people’s sense of connection and belonging.

Our focus over the next year is to reach out to our people, armed with a greater understanding of who we are, to create experiences, support and initiatives that reflect our increased cultural intelligence across our business. So far, around 50% of our people (excluding employees in wholly-owned subsidiaries) have shared their ethnicity data with us, and this remains a focus for the year ahead. Spark is also committed to encouraging authentic ethnic participation in our business, and we are working alongside credible partner organisations Diversity Works, Champions for Change, Global Women, and the Sustainable Business Council, to develop a framework and subsequent actions to support positive change.Ī key enabler of establishing meaningful approaches within our own business is having a clear picture of workforce ethnicity data. In order to create meaningful movement and change around ethnic diversity we need access to quality data to provide us with a benchmark of what our organisation currently looks like, and greater insight into the changes that we need to make to improve representation. Our Leadership Squad has a 60% female and 40% male split. Our Board is 43% female and 57% male, with three female directors (including our CEO) and four male directors. The proportion of females in our Wider Leadership Group (senior leaders outside of the Board and Leadership Squad) is 47%. Overall, across Spark group we have female representation at 34%. Our diversity performanceOur ambition is to achieve 40:40:20 representation Spark-wide, which refers to 40% men, 40% women, and 20% of any gender (as well as gender diverse representatives). Collaboration by diverse teams is what creates magic.

To help all of New Zealand grow, stand strong and thrive in a digital world. It’s also reflected in Spark’s adoption of Agile ways of working, which relies on creating diverse teams that can use their different backgrounds, perspectives, experiences and skills to solve complex customer problems. Āwhinatia ngā tāngata katoa o Aotearoa kia matomato te tipu i te ao matihiko This is reflected in Spark’s purpose: T o help all of New Zealand win big in a digital world. We aspire for diversity and inclusion to be “how things are done at Spark” – embedded into our day-to-day activities, standards, and business practices.

Stand strong together maoria