Cancer Council NSW committed to being an inspirational place to volunteer and work
Following another challenging year, we have continued to respond to the impacts of COVID-19 on our people and the work we do in the community, maintaining our commitment to be an Inspirational Place to Volunteer and Work. We’ve made significant achievements in key priority areas including our Diversity & Inclusion strategy, environmental sustainability initiatives, and employee engagement and satisfaction scores.
Supporting wellbeing and flexibility
As a people-centric organisation, the wellbeing of our people is a priority, and we have a number of programs to provide support in this area. The Employee Assistance Program (EAP) continues to offer counselling support to our staff and volunteers and year on year we have seen uptake increase. Our Mental Health Awareness sessions took place in early 2021 to help combat the impact the pandemic has had on mental health and equip staff to support their peers.
Like many organisations, we had to adjust quickly to working from home fulltime again in June 2021. This time around, we heard that our people were feeling more isolated, and many were struggling to balance work with the pressures of home schooling or childcare. In response, our leadership team encouraged staff to adjust their work schedules and prioritise their wellbeing. We have committed to building out our flexible working offering into the future.
Our comprehensive Work Health and Safety (WHS) approach is helping us continue to build a culture of education around wellbeing and safety in the workforce, which we measure through a new WHS incident and reporting system.
Focusing on inclusive storytelling and recruitment
In late 2020 we launched our Diversity & Inclusion strategy, BeingMe@NSWCC. Our Diversity & Inclusion strategy empowers our people to play a role in creating and growing a diverse and safe work environment, while our membership to the Diversity Council of Australia gives our people further opportunities to understand diversity dimensions in more depth, through a library of resources and webinars.
We’ve also made progress in our recruitment and leadership objectives around Diversity & Inclusion and unconscious bias. This year we reviewed our job descriptions and onboarding process to remove any barriers for people of varying diversities and piloted unconscious bias training to our leader’s forum – a first step towards a more thorough diversity training program.
Our engagement survey saw a 5% increase in the diversity and inclusion space, reflecting the impact so far of our strategy.
Fostering environmental responsibility in the workplace
In 2019 the Green Daffodils was formed, an internal working group which encourages environmental responsibility at Cancer Council NSW, driven by 2019 learnings showing that our people care deeply about working in a sustainable environment.
This year through the Green Daffodils, we have educated and changed behaviours across several priorities, resulting in an audit of single use plastics and changing the way we dispose of rubbish and recycling. We also acquired our first hybrid fleet vehicles to reduce our ecological footprint as an organisation, as well as a commitment to seek hybrid options when vehicles come up for replacement.
These initiatives contributed to a significant increase of 19% in engagement scores relating to environmental responsibility.
Understanding and growing engagement
We have a highly engaged workforce who are passionate and committed, demonstrated by the strong engagement scores which have increased year on year.
Earlier this year we conducted our biennial engagement survey to help us understand how our people feel about working and volunteering for Cancer Council NSW and what could be improved. The feedback from this survey is vital in helping us create an environment where people feel inspired, truly valued and supported.
Our results were once again very strong and recognised by Voice Project’s ‘Best Workplaces for 2021’ Award. This prestigious award recognises a small group of organisations across more than 40 industries that have achieved exceptional levels of employee engagement and satisfaction.