Hearing Australia recognises that its employees are key to its success. We invest in our employees to ensure their capabilities continuously grow and develop so they achieve their personal career ambitions and drive organisational performance.

The launch of our new name and brand in July 2019 was the result of extensive research and client feedback and a symbol of our commitment to delivering even more value to our clients and to government. As part of this, we focussed on providing our staff with insights into the expectations of our clients and how to improve client experience.

We also launched our Future Leaders development program. The aim of this program is to build the capability of high potential managers to increase their effectiveness in their current roles and to increase their readiness to assume a more senior role in the future. The program combines “classroom” learning and focusses on topics such as coaching skills and assisting participants to better understanding themselves as leaders.

Providing our people with a positive working environment

Our goal is to provide a working environment in which our employees enjoy coming to work and do their best work each and every day. To better understand how our employees experience working for Hearing Australia, we conduct internal pulse surveys as well as bi-annual formal employee engagement surveys.

Employees have let us know the areas they felt we were doing well in and provided us with valuable feedback on the things we could do better. The strengths that employees identified included:

• supportive environment created by peers and managers
• team members working effectively together to achieve their goals.
• employees understanding how their individual goals relate to Hearing Australia’s purpose.

In response to this feedback, we are focussing on the following priorities:

• providing more visible and aligned leadership at all levels
• developing new ways of working together
• better recognition of staff.

A key component of providing a positive working environment is ensuring it is diverse and inclusive for all of our employees. Achievements we are particularly proud of include:

• progressing our Reconciliation Action Plan, with our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment rate continuing to grow, and
• some two thirds of our people leaders are female.

Business Ethics Policy​

Hearing Australia has a Business Ethics Policy which ensures that our people understand:

• the values that underpin the way we do business
• the commitments and expectations that govern our interaction with others
• the standards of workplace behaviour that are expected
• behaviours that are unacceptable and require action
• The consequences of breaching the requirements of this Policy.

A summary of Hearing Australia’s key staffing statistics for 2018-19 and 2017-18:

All ongoing employees current report 2018-2019

All ongoing employees current report 2017-18

Note: There are no non-ongoing employees current for either period 2018-19 or 2017-18

Safety and wellbeing

Hearing Australia is committed to providing a safe environment for employees, clients and visitors. We are continuously improving our performance in workplace safety and striving to make our workplace injury free. During 2018-19 our Work Health and Safety (WHS) management system was recertified against the Australia and New Zealand Standard AS/NZS 4801 for Occupational Health and Safety Systems. The external audit identified zero non-conformances.

Key initiatives we also implemented to further improve our safety performance included:

• improving WHS training for employees at key stages in the employee lifecycle
• partnering more closely with Comcare to ensure optimal rehabilitation for injured employees
• building Centre Manager capability to proactively manage safety in their workplace via internal audits.

While Hearing Australia will continue to focus on doing even better, it is pleasing to note that our accepted workers’ compensation claims rate (per 1,000 FTE) has continued to decrease over the past three years. Our improved WHS performance and the support we provide to employees who are injured has also resulted in lower workers’ compensation claims costs.

Hearing Australia was not issued any Prohibition, Non-Disturbance or Provisional Improvement notices during the year. No notifiable or dangerous incidents were reported to Comcare.

WHS Indicators