Ventia is a leading essential infrastructure services provider that makes infrastructure work for communities across Australia and New Zealand. They are a top 200 Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) company with a secondary listing on New Zealand’s Exchange (NZX).

Ventia specialises in the long-term operation, maintenance, and management of critical public and private assets and infrastructure across various industry segments, including Defence and Social Infrastructure, Telecommunications, Transport and Infrastructure Services.

In a business the size of Ventia, with 35,000+ people located in over 400 worksites, they are proud to provide the services that keep the infrastructure working for communities and are committed to making positive contributions to society through their work. Ventia needed to create a common and consistent framework for delivering social sustainability outcomes, with a strategy that aligned corporate, project, and local-level initiatives.

Ventia looked at several models for measuring their socio-economic impact but couldn’t find one that sufficiently captured the value of their contribution, given that, for the most part, the assets that they work on don’t belong to them. Therefore, they needed a methodology that could cope with their unique requirements but was credible, robust, and defendable.

Ventia decided to engage an organisation called Social Value Portal (SvP), which was behind the TOMs System, which has been used in Europe for over ten years. The TOMs system is cited in several Australian research papers as the international best practice model. Ventia worked with SvP to develop bespoke measures and proxy values for spend and employment tailored to the Australian context. In Jan / Feb 2024, Ventia was the first company in Australia to publish social value performance using the TOMs System.

Three main areas of focus for the initiative which include:

1. Framework: Developing a common and consistent framework for delivering social sustainability outcomes across more than 400 projects in communities throughout Australia and New Zealand that aligns Ventia’s capacity as a business with the needs of communities to ensure they are deliberate and targeted in delivering the most positive social and economic impact they can for society.
2. Measurement: Measuring the socio-economic impact of activity.
3. Collaborating for success: Collaboration across sectors to develop a common and consistent methodology for calculating the socio-economic impact of a company’s activities. It also helps organisations understand the effectiveness of their initiatives and offer customers a comparative insight into their supplier’s performance.

Ventia developed a common minimum standard for delivering social sustainability outcomes more consistently across businesses. This common and consistent approach improves and increases the outcomes they can deliver for communities, which is essential to their success and a reflection of their values as an organisation.

Through the social sustainability framework, Ventia aims to strengthen its position as a leader in social value. This involves embedding sustainable practices into corporate culture, decision-making processes, and external collaborations, ensuring that operations not only align with but actively contribute to meeting customer requirements, broader business objectives and the wider societal good Ventia is able to demonstrate.

This is the first time that an organisation has measured its social value impact in this way in Australia. Ventia proudly reported that in 2023, its estimated social value contribution was $4.32bn. In future years, it plans to expand the activity inputs included in this calculation to provide a truer reflection of its total social impact.

This framework and the work leading the Social Sustainability Taskforce are creating system change across Australia and New Zealand that will positively impact communities.

For information about Ventia, visit ventia.com