Nine’s new chair Catherine West faced a grilling by shareholders over the media company’s cultural problems and why they were not picked up sooner.
West, who has been a board member for eight years and only recently was elevated to chair, said that staff had been reluctant to raise complaints about bullying and sexual harassment and that the board was none the wiser.
“I wish I had known and we really did look for it,” West said. “When we would do surveys, we would ask the management team to literally look for word searches around inappropriate behaviour, bullying, harassment, it wasn’t there. We had all the normal reporting processes. We’ve had sexual and inappropriate conduct training, so we have all the normal things you would expect from a company about size and responsibility.
“What we really have found out is that the reporting levels were really low because people didn’t trust those systems, and there was a very severe imbalance of power, which we did not understand.
“The media average of sexual harassment is 66 per cent (according to the Intersection report) across all employees. We have a reported number of 22 per cent, which is still too high, but we are below the national average. But one in five is not acceptable. We did not understand the impact of the abuse of power on people, and people were not reporting.”
West has been on the Nine board for eight years and her inability to discover the long-standing cultural issues in Nine’s newsroom didn’t satisfy all shareholders.
One shareholder, Julieanne Mills, questioned how West and other board members were not aware of underlying cultural issues given that “the reputation of the industry has been fairly poor for a very long period of time”.
Mills said it reflected poorly on Nine’s governance that it did not have the right dialog and reporting structures in place to surface the problem.
West responded: “What the intersection report has said is that there were leadership failures at all levels of the business, and it’s up to every single leader in the business to step up,” she said.
“So part of this is exercising the muscle to hold people to account, not walking past anything that you see. And that is a big cultural change for a lot of industries, and particularly our industry, people have accepted things that are not acceptable for far too long.”
What’s next?
West and interim CEO Matt Stanton laid out some details on what Nine intends to do next. This includes an action plan that goes “above and beyond” the 22 recommendations that have been made by the Intersection report.
As well as breaking down the power imbalances and “risk factors” that enable bullying and sexual harassment to take place.
Nine is overhauling its interviewing processes, enhancing its complaints reporting line that will lean on trauma experts to make staff feel more comfortable to report bad behaviour. Nine also introduced enhanced sexual harassment training that is compulsory for all staff.
The business has also conducted more than 120 interviews with its news and current affairs team to get to the root of the problem.
“It is still early days, but there will be change at night, and individuals will be held to account for this behaviour of this nature,” Stanton said. “The board and management are absolutely united on the need to accelerate change and to support workplace reform. Disappointingly, these issues appear to be prevalent across the media industry, where history coupled with structural power imbalances have enabled inappropriate behaviour.
“At Nine, we intend to tackle our issues transparently, and are determined to lead the sector on broad cultural reform.”
West, who took over the chair when Peter Costello suddenly stepped down in June, received enough support from shareholders to continue in the role, while a vote about executive pay received a first strike protest vote with more than 37 per cent voting against the remuneration report.
Nine is still on the hunt for a new permanent CEO after Mike Sneesby resigned in September.
