SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Social responsibility is a core value and basic foundation of the way we operate at IAG. Our commitment to social responsibility is an important step in ensuring that we engage constructively with customers, governments, our people and the many communities in which we operate.

We are committed to ensuring that we have appropriate policies and agreed practices to guide our actions, based on what the community expects from us. These focus on key areas including employee practices, our conduct in the marketplace, environmental care, governance and ethical conduct, occupational health and safety, human rights and community involvement.

Our customers

We are committed to serving the interests of our customers and regularly monitor our customers' satisfaction with our products and services at the time of sale as well as at the point of claim. We aim to continually improve our customer satisfaction results, and they are a key measure in our executive team's performance indicators.

We believe in giving our customers clear and transparent information about our products so they can make the right decisions about their level of cover. We work to ensure that our policy documents and product disclosure statements are worded clearly and simply. Rather than bombard our customers with text heavy amendments to policies, we provide additional information in clear, concise supplements that are easier to digest.

We also take privacy very seriously. As an insurer, we require a significant amount of information about our customers' lives and have adopted policies to ensure this information is protected.

Our commitment to our customers extends beyond the point of sale and the unfortunate time of claim. Helping our customers understand their exposure to risk and how to reduce their risks is one of the strongest benefits we can deliver.

We do this by using our claims data and information from our Research Centre to measure and reduce risk in the community. The Research Centre is the Australian representative of the international association of insurance research centres, the Research Council for Automobile Repair, which comprises 25 members from 21 countries.

Using this research, we:
• work with the car and building industries to actively encourage improvements in design and costs by ensuring that risk is reflected in insurance premiums. This contributes to the long term affordability of insurance;
• help the community to understand and reduce risk through public advocacy programs such as car security research, the Reversing Visibility Index, and road black spots;
• communicate to media, government and the community about risk and safety issues. Our road safety information, in particular, is used to help inform Federal Government policy in Australia;
• train our customer service staff to inform customers about risks; and
• develop online tools such as the Helphouse and the Greensafe Car Profiler, which help customers assess and reduce their own risks.

IAG has been accepted as the only insurance based contributor to ANCAP (Australasian New Car Assessment Program). This is the independent body that performs crash tests to determine the safety of vehicles in severe crashes. ANCAP's objective is to improve the crash safety of cars available to the Australian and New Zealand public.

IAG also undertakes research to understand and promote action to reduce the risks posed by climate change.

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Our shareholders

We believe that returns to investors, and the company's own stability and growth potential, will be enhanced by conducting the business in a way that creates value for society on numerous fronts.

We do this because running a successful business, including having access to the capital and community support that we need to grow, is the best way for us to align the interests of our shareholders with society's needs and expectations.

IAG is committed to generating optimal returns when making decisions about how to invest its funds. We also align our investment philosophy with our broader sustainability framework, and for some of our investments, this means targeting opportunities to support environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. More information about our sustainable investment is presented in a case study in the 2008 performance section of this website.

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Our people

Our employees determine our success with all other stakeholder groups. They are the face of our brands to our customers, building trust at both the point of sale and at the time of claim. So building a workplace that supports and involves our employees, and inspires them to do their best work every day, is one of our most important goals.

We aim to build this kind of workplace by:
• attracting and retaining the right people that reflect the rich diversity of the communities in which we operate;
• working with our employees to create a culture that promotes and supports high performance and is defined by behaviour based on our values of honesty, transparency, teamwork, meritocracy and social responsibility;
• providing opportunities for our employees to develop their skills and careers; and
• ensuring we have simple and efficient processes in place to involve and support our employees.

IAG's performance on workplace indicators is detailed in the 2008 performance section of this website.

As an employer of around 15,000 people, we work to ensure our workplace options are flexible enough to meet the demands of today's diverse workforce. We offer our people:
• part time employment;
• flexible hours;
• compressed working weeks;
• job sharing arrangements;
• working from home options where appropriate;
• paid parental leave options;
• carer's leave; and
• carer's room facilities at our major sites.

The majority of our employees are in the 25–34 age bracket. Almost 60% of our employees are women. There is a social and economic imperative to ensure women feel valued at IAG, and to encourage them to return to work following parental leave. In Australia, we introduced the IAG Women's Forum and IAG's Women's Career Development Program to provide opportunities for women to develop their talents and careers at IAG. Based on our 2007 report to the Australian Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA), we were awarded Employer of Choice for Women (EOCFW) status in 2008. This is the fourth year IAG has been awarded the citation. This is a prestigious acknowledgment by EOWA of organisations that are recognising and advancing women in the workplace.

Skilled and well trained employees provide the right information in the right way to customers when and how they need it. Providing our employees with development opportunities is also one way of demonstrating how we value their contribution, and this in turn drives engagement. The development programs available to employees cover subjects such as occupational health and safety, product knowledge, communication skills, customer service and equal employment opportunities. More business specific content is provided by each business. We offer both facilitator led and online courses, providing access to over 200 web based programs.

We support our employees in pursuing extra curricular training and education. IAG employees regularly attend key conferences and seminars relevant to our business and their roles, and are encouraged to share the information gleaned at these events with their teams. We also provide financial and leave support for those employees pursuing tertiary education and professional qualifications. The External Study Support policy provides our employees with a refund of fees upon successful completion of each subject, and conditional leave upon an acceptable level of work being maintained.

We communicate to our employees through many channels, including regular email bulletins, newsletters and videos. We create opportunities for our executive team and managers to communicate decisions and findings from meetings to our employees at divisional meetings, senior manager meetings and team meetings. Channels such as staff consultative committees, employee focus groups and CEO mailboxes provide employees with the opportunity to give suggestions and feedback.

We have a variety of avenues that our employees can use to report issues affecting the quality of our workplace. These include:
• an employee's direct manager;
• a dedicated help line for issues including discrimination, recruitment and staff development;
• an intranet mailbox for reporting and managing compliance incidents;
• accident/incident and hazard management forms for reporting and managing workplace health and safety issues; and
• the CEO mailbox which allows employees to report issues directly to the IAG CEO.

As a leading provider of workers' compensation in Australia, we have experience in safe workplace practices. We apply this knowledge to our own premises and operations, with the aim of providing a healthy, safe and secure environment for all our employees.

Our Besafe program supports all our employees and provides guidance on how every individual can take responsibility for safety and preventing injuries. We also have a rigorous reporting and monitoring framework in place, and every manager and employee is required to undertake online training in occupational health and safety.

Finally, we offer all our employees a wide range of benefits and incentives including:
• discounts on IAG insurance products;
• discounts on products and services provided by our preferred external suppliers;
• workplace giving—IAG matches staff donations to a preferred charity dollar for dollar (capped at $1 million pre financial year);
• volunteering day—AU IAG employees are entitled to one day of paid volunteering leave each year so that they can contribute to their local communities;
• rewardhelp—our employee reward and recognition program enables both employees and managers to nominate a colleague for 'reward points' which can be traded for a range of products and services;
• competitive superannuation scheme;
• employee share plans;
• salary sacrificing; and
• short term incentive program.

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Community involvement

As a leader in the general insurance industry we have a responsibility to the communities around us. We have a long and proud history of supporting a large range of community programs, partners and activities.

Our community programs target road and home safety, crime prevention, workplace safety, emergency services and climate change. Risk reduction in these areas helps make the communities in which our customers and our people live safer and more secure, leading to fewer claims which in turn contributes to the long term affordability of insurance. It makes good business sense to focus our community efforts on these areas.

We have developed key partnerships with community organisations such as:
• Kidsafe in Australian Capital Territory, Western Australia and Queensland;
• Cure Kids in New Zealand;
• NRMA CareFlight in New South Wales;
• Salvation Army Emergency Services in New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia; and
• Queensland State Emergency Services who are closely aligned to our own safety culture.

We also partner with our suppliers operating in industries that are experiencing skills shortages. Working with our preferred autobody and building industry suppliers throughout Australia and New Zealand, we have established a trade career apprenticeship program that supports individuals in pursuing a career in the autobody repairer and building industries.

Our wide ranging communityhelp program provides many opportunities for our employees to not only reduce risk, but to get involved in their communities. For example:
• communityhelp workplace giving allows our employees to donate to selected charities through their regular before tax pay. IAG matches donations dollar for dollar;
• communityhelp champion roles provide employees with the opportunity to take the lead in their community. This network of employees encourages employee participation in our variety of community initiatives;
• communityhelp volunteering enables our people to take one day of paid volunteering leave per year to participate in and contribute to their local communities; and
• communityhelp grants allow employees to nominate a community group that is working to make communities safer for a grant of up to $5,000.

IAG's community investment performance is detailed in the 2008 performance section of this website.

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Basic rights

The convergence of human rights and business responsibility is serious and complicated. Given that our operations extend across a number of countries, we are building a consistent approach across all of our businesses.

In consultation with a range of stakeholders we launched the IAG Code of Ethics in 2007. The Code includes the issue of human rights and our commitment to universally protect them. This important policy has been underpinned by our compliance framework to ensure our employees understand their responsibilities and Group expectations.

IAG is also a part of Business for Millennium Development (formerly the Business for Poverty Relief Alliance), a forum of corporations including IBM, Visy, Grey Global Group, KPMG, The Fifth Estate and World Vision Australia. The Alliance has the following aims:
• to inspire and enable Australian business to join the effort to fight poverty and align their activities with the Millennium Development Goals; and
• to educate and equip business to advocate for the Australian government to make a greater commitment to poverty relief.

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