Returning to the workforce

Six years ago John Ring had an accident while working as a lithographic printer, when a machine trapped his arms, causing serious damage that required him to undergo five years of surgery and rehabilitation to regain the use of his hands and arms.

After accepting he couldn’t continue working as a printer, due to the physical nature of the job, Ring looked for other work, but was repeatedly knocked back by prospective employers who told him the lack of function in his hands would be a problem.

Through a return-to-work program with CRS Australia, a federal government department that provides vocational rehabilitation services, and a job opportunity through the Aspire program at Aegis Australia, Ring was able to put himself on a training path to becoming a call centre trainer.

“I come home very satisfied, very happy, I have a job where I feel I’m part of a family and a team,” Ring says. “Most people at Aegis Australia wouldn’t know that I have a severe disability, I’ve been accepted straight away.”

This commitment by Aegis to diversity candidates such as Ring is part of an embedded culture.

“We really look at a larger people strategy and have purposefully gone to the regional sites, 25km out of Melbourne, to look for a different labour pool and different types of employees as well. It’s been really positive for us,” Aegis’s director of human resources Andrea Gannon says.

The Aspire program works with a number of candidates in the pre-employment space each year, attempting to get individuals back into the workforce, while also helping the company achieve a diverse workforce.

“We’re a bit like the UN here, we’ve got 55 nationalities and the male to female ratio is 51 per cent male to 49 per cent female, and our average age is around 27, so we’re a young organisation,” Gannon says.

“We’ve been really open, particularly over the last 12 months, around mental health issues and have run internal programs with BeyondBlue for managers to better understand mental health within their workforce.”

These strategies around diversity and their training policies were key to attracting attention from the judging panel at Aon Hewitt earlier this year when Aegis joined the ranks of the 11 Aon Hewitt Best Employers for 2011.

Being its own registered training organisation, Aegis is able to offer nationally certified qualifications to its staff to project them through the ranks of employees.

In recognising instances of high turnover of staff in call centres and the fact that many people view the profession as lacking in long-term career potential, the company designed career map posters to display around the office, outlining various training courses available to help employees progress to the next level within the business.

“We do have a lot of people coming into the business who say they didn’t realise how many opportunities there were, so we focus on providing the training and leadership and technical skills, which has always helped us retain employees,” Gannon says.

In line with this the company provides bimonthly open sessions where the head of a particular department provides information about what is involved in that area of business, what types of role there are and the experience required to move into this division.

To follow up from this, the company will take expressions of interest from anyone wishing to make a change to a different department, and when a secondment or permanent job becomes available they approach these candidates first.

“It’s about letting our employees make informed decisions about their future and it also helps to keep our talented staff, because we’ve got great performers in every business,” Gannon says. The company recognised the need to embed a culture of coaching into its 2800 employees in 2009 and hired a full-time accredited coach to run the leadership department, with a view to having them provide coaching in philosophy, skills and techniques for all future leaders of the business.

“Having a coaching culture has been linked with successful organisations — not only do they benefit the individual, but help with retention, cohesion, productivity, higher morale the cross-fertilisation of ideas and it really stimulates business development and relations between the team and the manager,” Gannon says.

The coaching program is divided into different tiers, with team-leaders gaining technical knowledge on how to get their employees working effectively and increasing performance through a series of workshops, followed by one-on-one sessions with the company coach.

“The program empowers the individual throughout and not only have we seen some great results in personal areas but we’ve also seen business performance increasing,” she says.

For the high-potential and business leaders the coaching focuses more on their personal areas of development with emotional intelligence testing. “We’re looking at their underlying thoughts and motivations in relation to their behaviour and the great thing about it is you can overlay it with their management and leadership style, by inviting 360-degree feedback.

“It’s been a great tool to be able to see individuals, teams and also the competencies where the organisation needs to work on from a leadership style perspective,” Gannon says.