How Orica brought its value of integrity to life through recognition

Orica is a global leader in mining and infrastructure solutions, operating across diverse roles, environments, and geographies. With safety‑critical work and complex operations at its core, Orica relies on clearly defined values to guide decision‑making, behaviour, and accountability across the organisation.

At the heart of Orica’s culture are five core values: safety, respect, together, integrity, and excellence — principles designed to shape how work gets done every day. But for values to truly drive behaviour, they need to be more than words. They need to be seen, reinforced, and lived in real moments of work.

That’s where bravO, Orica’s employee recognition program, plays a critical role.

Through bravO, Orica turns values into visible behaviours. Employees are recognised for how they show up, the choices they make, and the actions that reflect what the organisation stands for. The result is a stronger, shared understanding of what “good” looks like: reinforcing the right behaviours, building cultural consistency, and bringing Orica’s values to life across the workforce.

Making values visible — and centring on integrity

While Orica’s values were well understood in principle, one surfaced as more difficult to recognise in practice. Integrity consistently received fewer recognitions than any other value.

This wasn’t because integrity mattered less. Employees clearly understood its importance. But compared to other values, many found it harder to spot — and describe — what acting with integrity looked like in the flow of everyday work.

As a result, integrity‑driven behaviours were happening across the organisation, but they weren’t always being called out, clearly named, or consistently celebrated.

The challenge:

Orica needed to make integrity easier to recognise, translating it from a broadly understood principle into visible, actionable behaviours that could be consistently reinforced and sustained over time.

What Orica set out to achieve

Orica wasn’t chasing a short‑term surge in recognition. The real objective was deeper and more durable: clear behavioural signals and sustained reinforcement of what integrity truly looks like at work.

To get there, the organisation focused on three outcomes that would drive lasting impact:

1. Increase both the volume and quality of integrity‑related recognitions
2. Build a shared, practical understanding of integrity in action — not just in theory
3. Create a lasting connection between integrity and everyday behaviour, rather than a one‑off, campaign‑driven lift

A recognition campaign centred around integrity

To tackle the challenge, Orica launched a month‑long campaign recognising acts of integrity using bravO.

The idea was simple: make integrity easier to spot and easier to recognise. Employees across the organisation were encouraged to call out colleagues who demonstrated integrity in their day‑to‑day work, using clear, relevant, real‑world examples.

During the campaign, employees were invited to:

• Recognise peers, leaders, and teammates whose actions reflected Orica’s five values
• Use bravO to recognise colleagues when they saw integrity in action
• Share specific examples of integrity put into practice, from ethical decision‑making and transparent communication to sustainable practices and following-through on commitments

By grounding recognition in everyday moments, Orica helped employees move past abstract definitions and build confidence in recognising integrity where it mattered most: in the work itself.

Bringing the integrity campaign to life

To ensure strong reach across office‑based and frontline employees, Orica used a multi‑channel communications approach, including:

• An intranet launch post featuring strong examples of past integrity recognitions to model quality submissions
• bravO notifications, email communications, and Microsoft Teams announcements to reach employees where they work
• Campaign posters across operational sites to engage frontline teams
• A mid‑month intranet feature spotlighting a standout integrity recognition, supported by senior leader quotes
• A reminder post on Viva Engage to maintain momentum
• A post‑campaign intranet announcement celebrating 10 winners and showcasing their recognitions

Participation was lightly incentivized. Employees who submitted recognitions under the integrity value were entered into a draw, with 10 nominators receiving a small points price — reinforcing positive behaviour while keeping the focus squarely on values.

Clear calls to action, visible leadership endorsement, and peer‑driven recognition helped lower barriers to participation and encouraged meaningful engagement throughout the campaign.

The integrity campaign delivered clear and measurable results:

• 350% increase in integrity‑related recognitions during the campaign month
• Noticeable improvement in recognition quality and specificity, with employees clearly articulating integrity behaviours and their impact
• Increased employee awareness of how integrity shows up in everyday work

Just as importantly, the impact extended well beyond the campaign itself.

In the six months following the campaign, recognitions centred around integrity increased 27% year over year compared to the same period the previous year, signalling sustained reinforcement rather than a short‑term spike.

While recognition alone can’t directly measure behaviour change, Orica uses recognition trends as a proxy for behavioural reinforcement. The sustained uplift indicated that integrity behaviours continued to be noticed, valued, and celebrated across the organisation.

Turning values into a competitive advantage through recognition

The integrity campaign wasn’t a one‑off — it was the framework for embedding and amplifying company values through recognition.

Over the course of the year, Orica expanded this approach across all five core values, further establishing a consistent, values‑led recognition strategy that reinforced what great work looks like at every level of the organisation. Each campaign built momentum, strengthening the connection between bravO, company values, and the everyday behaviours that drive performance.

Together, these initiatives moved values from aspiration to action, embedding them into how people work, decide, and show up for one another.

The result:

Recognition became more than appreciation. It became a strategic, repeatable way to shape culture, reinforce expectations, and scale the behaviours that matter most, ensuring Orica’s values don’t just guide the business, but power it forward.