Inclusion saves money

Over the last 12 months I have been involved in the rail industry on a couple of fronts, including mentoring in the Australasian Railway Association (ARA) Women's mentoring program, and working with one of my favourite clients in freight rail.

I learnt that that the biggest commercial imperative to building an inclusive culture within the rail industry, is to retain their train drivers.

Train drivers are the core role in any rail operation, and they:

- Take a long time to train

- Are expensive to train, so

- You don't want to lose them once they are fully trained.

I recently saw a post from Auckland Transport about the new City Rail Link project, which will open during 2026. To be fully operational they need to train 270 drivers, and it takes 12 months to train a driver from scratch.

Driver training includes learning theory, participating in simulations, becoming familiar with the stations, gaining hands on experience, emergency scenario testing, and more.

Here's the commerical reality:

👉 Trainee annual salaries typically start from NZ$86,000.

👉 The minimum annual trainee salary x 270 drivers = $23,220,000 a year

This figure doesn't take into account all the other costs of training the train drivers, such as the people running the training, or the costs of buildings to have spaces for the training, all the administration around the training, and the recruitment of the drivers to start with. The real cost would be much more.

Using LiveRem latest quarterly labour market stats (Q4 2025) the annual employee turnover rate in New Zealand was 15.3%.

If Auckland Transport loses 15.3% of their trainee drivers in one year it costs them $3,552,660!!

Now I get that there are many reasons that drivers might leave, but we know that a strong and inclusive culture will improve the employee experience and have a positive business impact, through retaining their people.

In this example, if you could reduce the turnover by a third you could save over $1M

Makes you think doesn't it?

Lisa xx