People & Culture

What do we do to attract, retain and develop our employees? Our corporate policies help, but there are other more broad-ranging initiatives underway, including the launch of new programs that recognise the benefits of a happy, healthy and engaged workforce.

Our people are our strength

The strength of any organisation ultimately rests with its people. To put our people first, we’re transforming our organisation in three key ways:

• putting in place the right people and systems to drive organisational growth and profitability
• developing our digital capabilities with a focus on our clients
• recruiting and retaining high-calibre individuals who believe in our vision for our business.

Strength through diversity

We value and encourage diversity in our organisation across gender, race, nationality and sexual orientation. Policies ensure that we hire and promote employees wholly on merit and without discrimination. Wherever possible we advertise all roles internally first, and strive to promote from within.

The gender breakdown of our employees (as at 29 February 2016) was 50/50 across males and females. Over the last couple of years we’ve increased the number of senior female managers. Our executive team now consists of five male and three female members, and our board has five males and two females.

Strength through knowledge

To ensure our staff have the knowledge and skills they need, we see recruitment and development as a four-step process.

1. Considered recruitment

We run a comprehensive recruitment program to ensure we’re attracting employees who have the right skills, qualifications, motivation and a belief in our values.

2. Tailored induction

We complement this with an induction and on-boarding program tailored for each role, employee skill and knowledge level.

3. Formalised learning and development

We believe in supporting employees in their professional and personal goals, so we offer a formalised learning and development program. All employees have individual personal development plans and objectives aligned to our business plan.

4. Leadership and certification

We provide a leadership program and externally-delivered courses covering topics like time management and presentation skills. For our financial planners we have tailored, funded education programs to help them attain a Certified Financial Planner® certification: the highest professional qualification for financial planners. Our planner development also includes a newly-developed graduate program to support the sustainability of our business.

Measuring success

We realise how important the health of our work culture is to our success, and we manage it with the same skill and attention we pay to strategy, financials and other key performance indicators.

The tools we use within the organisation to measure engagement include the Aon Hewitt Employee Engagement Survey and the Denison Cultural Survey.

Employee engagement

We participated in the Aon Hewitt Employee Engagement Survey in 2011, 2013 and 2015. The survey gave us valuable data to help us identify and prioritise the factors that drive employee engagement. With this knowledge we have built programs around performance management, leadership and employer brand that have increased our engagement score to the top quartile of companies surveyed in Australia and New Zealand.

Corporate culture

The Denison Cultural Survey is a tool that gives organisations a baseline of current cultural strengths and weaknesses by asking 60 questions of their leadership group. Successful organisations have strengths across all four traits of the model – Mission, Adaptability, Consistency and Involvement. The survey benchmarks StatePlus against 1,000 high performing organisations globally.

Our results in 2015 dramatically shifted in all four quadrants, which tells us that we really have begun to meet the needs of clients, involve and engage our employees, and build a sense of shared ownership and teamwork. The values, systems and processes are now in place to promote consistent behaviour to achieve the goals of the organisation and its employees.

Employee health and wellbeing

We have a number of employee health and wellbeing initiatives in place, such as:

• annual influenza vaccinations
• the option to buy two weeks of extra annual leave each year
• Quit Smoking program support
• individual counselling for employees and family members through our Employee Assistance Program
• regional sporting and community events.

The Bliss program

To promote a happy and healthy workplace, we pulled all these initiatives together under the banner of an employee health and wellbeing program called Bliss. This covers four quadrants: body, mind, community and financial. The Bliss Committee is developing a series of local and organisation-wide initiatives to complement our corporate giving program.

Happy Body At Work

A highlight of this approach has been the recent launch of the ABC’s Happy Body At Work program. This is a bite-sized eight-week multimedia package with ideas for improving energy levels, decreasing tension, improving sleep, easing aches and pains, and relaxing your body.

We’ve already seen positive effects, with stories from our employees about the small changes they’ve made to sleep a little better, walk a little more, sit a little less and stress a little less.