Audit Express Diversity Equity & Inclusion Support Program

Audit Express is an award-winning advisory firm dedicated to helping organisations achieve operational excellence through auditing, quality and compliance services. Based in Melbourne, Australia, the Audit Express team works with a range of sectors, including Education, Health & Care, Government, Workplace Health & Safety, Food Safety and Hospitality & Tourism.

The business’s highly diverse team is proudly made up of members of the LGBTIQIA+ community and its allies, and is predominantly a female workforce. As of May 2022, 70% of Audit Express’s workforce identified as female, with 50% of these in senior executive positions.

With such a diverse workforce, the Audit Express team recognised that diversity, equity & inclusion are not just buzzwords, but essential values that organisations should be prioritising. Organisations perform at their best when the diverse qualities of its people are understood, respected and celebrated.

To Audit Express, embracing diversity means recognising, respecting and valuing differences in race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, and more. Equity ensures fairness, accessibility and equal opportunities for all individuals, while inclusivity means creating an environment where everyone feels respected, heard, and included. Belonging goes beyond diversity and inclusivity and creates a sense of community and acceptance where everyone feels like they belong.

Having worked for many years across various industry sectors, the team at Audit Express noticed a need for organisations to do more to improve their policies, processes and controls in support of greater diversity, equity and inclusion. The team observed that many organisations lacked a dedicated Diversity and Inclusivity Policy, and did not know where to start when it came to prioritising DE&I principles in their organisation’s policies and procedures.

As auditing and quality assurance professionals with a diverse workforce of its own, Audit Express believed that it could make a real difference within the organisations it worked with, and that diverse communities of employees, partners and customers would benefit greatly through more positive interactions with such organisations.