HRI has won ‘Best Workplace 2020’ for providing an exceptional work environment for staff, awarded by consultancy firm Voice Project.
“Initially we set out to understand staff wellbeing and learn if there was anything we could improve,” says Head of HR, Elissa Dywer.
We were pleased the results demonstrated that HRI is a caring organisation with staff welfare at the core of our decision-making.
Head of HR
“The main purpose of the survey was staff engagement. We chose a particularly difficult time to run the survey during the pandemic, but the results were even better than we could have hoped.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, HRI proactively offered multiple employee wellbeing initiatives around mental health identification and management, upgraded virtual meeting solutions, as well as arranged for more company-wide get togethers to keep all staff across the Institute’s changes, greater work flexibility, tools to reduce email volumes, and full transparency of COVID-safe planning.
In addition, HRI offered staff an in-house COVID-19 test using standard PCR assays. While not ratified diagnostic tests, these would still indicate if any staff were to be carrying the coronavirus. Staff were offered testing multiple times a week to minimise risk to the researchers on-site.
Those staff who were able to work from home were asked to do so, to keep them safe. This allowed HRI to maintain social distancing on-site while keeping essential research going and also keeping our scientists safe.
Director of Cardiovascular Research
The Voice Project surveyed all of HRI’s staff in October and asked employees to rank HRI’s performance on multiple indicators, such as recruitment, technology, learning and development, recognition, performance feedback, teamwork, supervision, workload, risk reporting, vision and values.
The results were benchmarked against those of other Australian medical research institutes and it was found that HRI outperformed the benchmark by an average of 11 per cent for those questions that had industry benchmarking. In addition, HRI secured an 80 per cent average score for all indicators. These strong results secured HRI the Best Workplace Award 2020, which only 10 per cent of Voice Project’s clients attain.
Voice Project’s core purpose is to improve organisations by giving people a voice and to help organisations improve employee engagement, leadership and service quality through surveying and consulting. Since inception they have given over 3.3 million employees ‘a voice’ and have run over 2,300 consultancy projects with more than 700 clients.
Header image: Dr Stephen Hollings (CEO, HRI) and Prof Shaun Jackson (Director of Cardiovascular Research, HRI) presented with the ‘Best Workplace 2020' award.