Health, Safety & Wellbeing
Embedding a culture of care and wellbeing.
Our approach and position
Westpac’s Health, Safety & Wellbeing Commitment
At Westpac, our people are our top priority as we work to create better futures together. In line with our purpose, Westpac is committed to providing a safe, secure, and injury-free workplace that enhances the wellbeing of our people, preventing harm by reducing the potential for work-related physical and mental injury and illness.
Westpac’s approach to health, safety and wellbeing (HSW) focusses on:
- Protecting our people by eliminating or minimising work-related physical and mental injury and ill-health, as reasonably practicable
- Improving our peoples’ experience of work, performance and wellbeing by supporting positive mental health
- Caring for our people through early intervention and supporting their recovery
- Maintaining our strong safety leadership culture, systems, and capability, focused on both mental and physical health and safety
- Meeting and exceeding HSW and workers’ compensation legal obligations and regulations
- Clearly defining and communicating HSW responsibilities
- Striving to improve our HSW performance by continuously reviewing and uplifting our HSW management system
- Engaging with our people on HSW matters to understand their experience and needs
- Providing information, training, and supervision to enable our people to do their jobs safely and effectively and to contribute to a safe and secure work environment
- Ensuring easy to use resources are available to support our people’s health, safety and wellbeing.
Refer to our Health, Safety and Wellbeing Statement of Commitment (PDF 97KB) to learn more about our approach.
Our policies
Our Health, Safety & Wellbeing (HSW) Policy (PDF 146KB) sets our approach to managing HSW including responsibilities for leaders and team members, consultation and training, workers compensation and injury management. Our HSW management system is developed to manage and protect the HSW of our people, contractors, suppliers and customers.
We maintain a comprehensive HSW management system which complies with work, health and safety (WHS) laws and regulation including The National Self Insurer’s Audit Tool Australia (NAT).
Key action areas
Support services
Our people and their immediate families have access to a free Employee Assistance Program (EAP) which offers a variety of services, such as counselling and coaching for people leaders. Our Employee Care team, which includes allied health professionals, provides support to our people to remain physically and mentally healthy at work and beyond, connecting them to care, injury management and return to work support where necessary.
Benefits and resources
We have toolkits, videos and programs dedicated to support the wellbeing of our people and their families. We also offer discounts on wellbeing products and services, free flu vaccinations each year, two ‘Culture, Lifestyle and Wellbeing’ paid days off per year and one Volunteering day.
Learning & development
All employees must complete HSW training and participate in regular conversations on safety and wellbeing in their team meetings using dedicated information packs. Our leaders are provided additional HSW training, which includes managing workplace mental health risks and providing supportive leadership to support employee wellbeing.
A mentally healthy workplace
We are committed to providing a mentally healthy workplace by improving our peoples’ experience at work and supporting positive mental health. Under the guidance of our Chief Mental Health Officer, we have a mental health strategy that focusses on preventing harm, early intervention and connected care along with safety leadership, culture and capability.
We have a range of resources available for our people to access, including processes to assess and manage workplace mental health risks and the provision of training developed in partnership with the Black Dog Institute.
Working environment
We aim to achieve best practice for the fit-out of our offices and branches. We are a member of the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA), which helps guide our approach. Our CBD corporate workplaces support our hybrid way of working and enable our people to collaborate, connect, and focus. To support our people’s wellbeing, we have end-of-trip facilities to support employee exercise and carbon neutral commuting. Visit our locations page for more information on our workplaces.
Our progress
We report regularly and aim to be as transparent as possible to enable stakeholders to compare our relative performance over time.
Find out how we seek to create economic, social and environmental impact in our Annual Report and Climate Report.