‘Guilty by chromosome’: Culture change doesn’t come easy for Rio’s workers

In 2022, mining giant Rio Tinto discovered it had a massively troubling workplace culture pervading the company from its corporate offices to remote mine sites – including serious incidents of rape, bullying, sexual harassment and racism.

Two years into its program to change that culture, the shocking rates of harmful behaviour haven’t improved and the number of reported sexual assaults has even worsened.

Rio Tinto is struggling to overhaul its troubling workplace culture.Credit: Bloomberg

It seems the forces for reform have been hit by the forces of those for whom the status quo works.

Cultural crusaders have clashed with anti-woke campaigners in a war that will take years to play out.

The numbers speak volumes. Eight people reported having experienced actual or attempted sexual assault or rape, compared to five people in 2021. Thirty-two people reported pressure or requests for sex or sexual acts, down from 37 in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of those experiencing sexual harassment hasn’t changed, and the 39 per cent of respondents saying they had been bullied has risen from 31 per cent in 2021. The same number experienced racism over the same period.

So it’s jarring that Rio still counts this as progress – which it bases on the fact that half of those surveyed reported a perceived improvement in bullying, racism and sexual harassment.

The disconnect between this felt improvement and the actual numbers provides a hard lesson in the difficulty and pace of changing culture, even with the best intentions in the world. It could be more intergenerational than just a multi-year task – truly a marathon, not a sprint.

The road map of Rio’s journey to overhaul its culture should be mandatory reading for company executives across all industries, particularly those with large male-dominated workforces.

Unhealthy workplace culture is an industrial relations scourge of epidemic proportions across Australia. For example, Nine, publisher of this masthead, recently found that 30 per cent of its staff in the broadcast segment had identified sexual harassment. Even more worrying, this shocking percentage is on par with the national average.

It should also be noted that Rio’s chief executive Jakob Stausholm isn’t a leader who gives lip service to the notion of overhauling workplace culture. The push is really coming from the top. And the miner’s transparency on progress – or lack of in the face of these disappointing outcomes – is also commendable.

Jakob Stausholm’s role as Rio’s chief executive has expanded into that of corporate therapist.Credit: Bloomberg

What was evident in Rio’s case is that despite improvements in some areas and the rollout of carrot-and-stick measures such as linking career progression and remuneration to people’s behaviour in the workplace, there is resistance and even retaliation from some cohorts. Or, as Rio noted in its progress report, there are areas “where resistance is evident and may be contributing to a rise in harmful behaviours”.

Stausholm puts this resistance inside Rio into a more general social pushback against standards seen as woke. “You can see some of those movements happening to society at large in Australia, in the US and the rest of the world,” he said.

In terms of changing a corporate culture, he says trying to make conditions better for minorities and improve the gender balance requires bringing the rest of the workforce along, and making it fair for them. “There are a lot of dilemmas in this,” he says.

It isn’t surprising that there is a view among some workers that imposing “woke” standards on the workforce is changing the goalposts.

One survey respondent noted that “as a male, you feel like you are a perpetrator when you have got nothing to do with it. It is an implied guilty by chromosome. If you are not out there literally holding a placard, you are guilty by lack of voice. People find that hurtful.”

Stausholm appreciates that trying to set standards you haven’t had for people on the site for 25 years has its challenges, and it’s not easy for them to change. “It’s easy for us to put a line in the sand and say now this is the behaviour we now expect,” he says.

Rio’s head of Australia, Kellie Parker, reckons some people just don’t recognise disrespectful behaviour in the ways they’ve been conducting themselves throughout their careers. People were asking in the survey ‘why do we need to change if things have been OK in my team or in the business?’.

The upper echelons of management appear easier to school, but filtering this down to the shop floor isn’t proving easy.

For Stausholm, his CEO role has expanded into that of corporate therapist.

The way he sees it, it’s “really about self-discovery because a lot of it is about unconscious behaviour. People are not self-aware enough.”

And what does success look like? More reporting, he says.

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