Ben Basil of Eli Lilly Australia describes the company's purpose and successful culture initiatives
Building an inclusive company culture is a challenge at a time of workplace transformation, and Eli Lilly Australia has lived up to it. As a result, the company received an Excellence Award as Employer of Choice in the 100–999 employees category at the 2021 Australian HR Awards.
In this interview, Benjamin Basil, president and general manager of Eli Lilly Australia and New Zealand, speaks about this recent achievement, which is linked to the company’s purpose. He says that in addition to developing innovative medicines, the company’s goal is “uniting, caring with discovery to make life better for patients and people all over the world”. In the past year, employees have contributed towards shaping the company culture by creating six diversity and inclusion groups, such as one that promotes gender equity.
“[Over] the last 24 months, we’ve gone from about 20% of our leadership team being female to well over 60% today. And I think that is evidence of the movement each and every day of our employees in terms of creating the culture that takes us into the future […] I think that female presence across all levels of our organisation has enabled everyone, regardless of whether you’re used to it or not, to put their voice out there to feel comfortable that they’re in a safe environment to do so.”
Basil says that Eli Lilly’s high levels of employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction is due to the company’s success in maintaining connectivity over the last 20 months while they adapted to a new environment. He says the company culture emphasises a family-friendly place where people care for one another.
“I think one of the biggest learnings is that some of that happens organically in the virtual environment and other facets of it have to be planned. And so we did a lot of different initiatives that created environments in which our employees can both get work done together and collaborate, but also to engage in different ways.”
For instance, the Harmony Walks initiative enables employees – including those who have never met in person – to take a virtual walk and have a 30-minute conversation. Basil also emphasises the importance of psychological safety to ensure that employees thrive in the organisation. The company organises a workshop where employees can experience different situations and encourage a dialogue for them to understand various perspectives, check their biases at the door, and uphold inclusiveness.
“Our culture is one where we want to harness the power of individual differences and certainly that’s present in our executive team and across our whole organisation. It’s very important in our minds that we have the ability to show up, be valued, have our voice be heard and appreciated so that we can make good decisions to support the business and ultimately patients,” says Basil.
