The pharmaceutical sector is one of Australia’s key industries, generating billions in revenue and employing a growing workforce of highly skilled professionals.
It is also a space where employers have been taking proactive steps to better support people with evolving caring obligations over their lifetimes.
How they’re achieving this is the focus of the latest podcast episode by Family Friendly Workplaces and Women’s Agenda.
The series steps into different sectors in Australia to spotlight the challenges working parents face while also speaking to employers carving out new ways of working.
In this episode, employers in the pharma sector reveal how they’re redefining corporate culture and making workplaces a space for workers to thrive, regardless of their caring obligations or gender.
Liz de Somer is the CEO of Medicines Australia, the peak body for the research-based pharmaceutical industry.
The organisation helped set up the Pharma Australia Inclusion Group, to help build a more inclusive industry.
When Somer had her first child, she says the pharmaceutical company she was working for at the time only offered two days of paid parental leave.
“So you can see that things have changed quite extraordinarily in the 20 plus years since those days,” she says.
“We’ve learned a lot over the last two decades and there has been enormous growth and change to make the workplace more accessible and careers more accessible to everybody.”
According to WGEA, a range of family friendly policies and practices have become standard in the pharmaceutical and medicinal product manufacturing industry.
Nearly 90 per cent of employers have formal policies around flexible working, the average parental leave period is around 12-and-a-half weeks and close to 90 per cent of employers have a policy to support employees through domestic violence.
A majority of employers also have policies in place to support staff with family and caring responsibilities along with counselling and external support.
“There’s a very large cohort of women in the pharmaceutical industry and therefore change had to happen and was embraced quickly and adopted,” she says.
As employers continue to change and improve the policies they offer and how their workplaces function, Novartis executives say one of the most important steps leaders can take is to role model family friendly values.
Novartis is a founding partner of the Family Friendly Workplaces (FFW) initiative that began in 2021.
Its country president for the ANZ region, Matt Zeller, is also a leading advocate in this space and recently became a FFW ambassador.
“Family is the most important thing in my life,” he says.
‘The environment that we’re building here at Novartis ANZ is one where it’s not about optimizing for a week or a month or a short-term deadline.
“It’s about building this long-term continuity and this long-term sort of vision together where we’re all buying into the same idea about what it looks like to be successful. And it’s not just successful professionally, it’s also personally because increasingly more and more, all these things get wrapped up together.”
While it’s really important to have the right policies on paper, Zeller says ultimately what matters is making sure there’s a culture in place with leaders at every level fully embracing family friendly conditions.
“Much more important for me is living through and showing that a family friendly workplace is a priority for us and for the leadership team,” he says.
“And when we talk about somebody going off on extended leave, it’s not something that we shy away from and that we shun, we actually are excited about it and celebrating it.
“At the end of the day, it comes down to the leadership team and to your individual boss, because a company could have the best policies in the world. But if your boss isn’t enforcing that or it’s not a conversation about how do we make this work for me and my situation and my family or interests or sexual orientation or whatever, then it doesn’t matter.
“So we’re big on the right policies and the right frameworks for us as a country, but then also the individual application and hiring the right people who really buy into that philosophy.”
The Family Friendly Workplaces Podcast is an initiative supporting the global work and family standards for workplaces which inform employers of the minimum and best practice policies they can invest in to create supportive family friendly workplace cultures where people and their families thrive.
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