Rochelle Grant from Fletcher Building on Diversity and Inclusion

Rochelle, welcome to Tribe. What are you doing now with the group, what's your role?

I've moved into a new role in the Organisation Development corporate space. My new role is Inclusion and Diversity Program Business Partner.

Amazing. With the work that you've been doing with Alexia at GirlBoss, tell me a little bit about that.

So probably about 12 months ago we started connecting in with Alexia. Alexia runs workshops at local colleges, so we started by going to a couple of those. We sponsored five of them at different schools across Auckland, and then we sat down with Alexia and said, "We want more, we want to do more for the business, we want to bring the girls into our business. What can we do from there?"

GirlBoss and Fletcher Building co-designed a program called the GirlBoss Advantage Program powered by Fletcher Building. It’s a fantastic program. We have only 18% females in our business, so we really want to change that. We are finding that when trying to attract girls in engineering and technology at the graduate level, we don’t have enough young females to choose from. So we want to help encourage them and inspire them at the high school age.

Can you tell me a little bit about the Switch-Up Program that you led?

Switch-Up is really different to a normal recruitment process. We don’t use any adverts, and we don’t have any CVs. It’s about working within the communities, mainly within South Auckland, and with work-ready partners across the country. We look at people who maybe wouldn’t fit the normal moulds but who are young people with enthusiasm, energy, communication - all of those soft skills - that can make a great employee, even if they don’t have a traditional work background.

Yeah, and you have great outcomes.

We have. We’ve had awesome outcomes.

Yeah, that’s amazing.