Employee benefits
Delivering for our people
As well as ensuring our eligible employees have access to their minimum entitlements, we provide additional benefits to parents who are starting or growing their family. Some of these benefits include 14 weeks full pay (or 28-weeks leave at half pay), secondary carers's leave and a superannuation Super Booster.
Our ‘Shared Care’ initiative provides greater choice for families considering childcare options for their child in the first year, where at least one partner works for Aurizon. ‘Shared Care’ is inclusive of all families including same sex couples and single parents and is available to birth parents and adoptive parents.
We have a ‘Help at Home’ program aimed at easing the transition back to work for employees to manage their responsibilities at home. It is available to all eligible employees returning to work after taking parental leave.
We provide paid annual leave in line with industry standards, accrued progressively during the year, accumulating each year. Some employees may be eligible for enhanced Long Service leave provisions.
In addition to personal and carers leave, some other leave benefits that may be available to employees are cultural leave, gender affirmation leave, military leave, leave to undertake jury duties as well as natural disaster and emergency services leave. Our employees can also request career breaks.
Depending on your role at Aurizon, there may be a number of flexible working arrangements available to you — a few include part-time employment, job sharing, adjusting start or finish times, flexible work schedules, working from home and graduated return to work.
We offer a free comprehensive independent Employee Assistance Program designed to support employees with the challenges and demands of day-to-day work and personal life.
EAP is a professional counselling service that offers confidential, short-term support for a variety of work-related and personal problems that may be affecting an employee at work or at home. It gives employees and members of their families 24/7 access to qualified professionals, including psychologists, social workers and management coaches.
We believe it's important to not only look after our own health, but where possible, contribute to others’ health as well. We offer paid leave, including travel time to support blood donation.
It is important for us to support local communities where our employees work and live and to give back where we can. The Aurizon Community Giving Fund, our bi-annual cash grant program, supports not-for-profits working in the areas of safety, education, environment and health and wellbeing. We also partner with organisations and community groups to deliver key local and regional programs, where our employees lead the engagement, creating stronger community connections.
We have a number of active employee-led social action groups fostering workplace inclusion and community engagement. This includes our ALLin Network for our LGBTQIA+ community and allies, a Gender Balance Reference Group and an Indigenous Reference Group.
As a company with a large regional community footprint, we are serious about having a positive influence on our nation’s reconciliation efforts. By focusing on relationships, respect and opportunities, we aim to create better partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities where we operate and strengthen the reconciliation journey for our company. Reconciliation Australia endorsed our third Reconciliation Action Plan as a ‘Stretch’ RAP, recognising the progress we have made with embedding reconciliation within our company.
We offer a two-year graduate development program to students from multiple Australian Universities to work across our operations. As part of this program, graduates are offered rotation opportunities, facilitating learning across a range of jobs and work environments. The program is open to all graduates regardless of when one may have graduated.
We offer an accelerated development program that is designed specifically for people with demonstrated leadership or technical experience from other industries who are looking to change, grow, or restart their careers.
We are using modern virtual reality tools and on-site experience to help our employees achieve nationally accredited qualifications. An example of this is our Trainee Locomotive Driver Program that recruits and trains locomotive drivers across our regions.
We also have a range of other internal development programs:
- Leading for Results is a frontline leader program to uplift capability and confidence in quality and safety.
- Rail 101 workshop provides employees with a broad understanding of the technical aspects of our business and how these interact to create enterprise value.
- Leading for High Performance is a platform to build leadership capability, creating a safety and performance culture where employees live the Company values.
- Online courses on multiple topics are available for personal development, compliance, onboarding and other business training needs.
