Supporting our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff

Our RAP Working Group and Yarrabee staff network.

This was the final year of our Stretch RAP 2020-23, which expires in September 2023. Our RAP Working Group and Yarrabee staff network for employees who come from an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander heritage continued to operate, with their annual face-to-face meeting in May.

We are proud to have increased the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff in senior leadership roles, including general manager, senior operations manager, team leaders and service co-ordinators.

Work is underway on our next RAP, which will be another Stretch RAP.

Northcott Pride

We set up Northcott Pride, a group for staff members who identify as LGBTQI+ and their allies. The group contributes to Northcott’s policies related diversity and inclusion as they apply to LGBTQIA+ employees and provides insights and feedback on our initiatives related to attracting, retaining and engaging workers who identify as LGBTQIA+. Northcott Pride also plays a role in planning social events, providing informal peer support and driving Northcott’s involvement in community events such as Fair Day and WorldPride.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

We are committed to creating a disability confident culture. This year, we have been focused on improving our support for staff with disability, as well as implementing ways to recruit and retain more people with disability as employees.

In April 2023, we added a diversity and inclusion statement to our job advertisement with the goal of attracting more applications from people with disability. We saw 51 applicants from people with disability in the last quarter of the financial year, compared with 19 in the first quarter.

Learning and Development

We provide staff with access to learning interventions so they can upskill and continue their professional development journey.

Our offerings range from onboarding training and leadership development programs, to online learning and new software implementation, plus other internal projects. Our goal is to support our workforce to not only be compliant with mandatory training requirements but to excel at their jobs, ultimately resulting in quality customer care.

Northcott aim to respond to the changing learning needs of the organisation while managing the capabilities of our staff.

In the coming year, we will implement:

• a Learning Management System to help employees manage what training they need to do and what options are available for their development
• a structured succession planning approach to develop our leadership cohort.

Our WHS activity is aligned with the Northcott Work Health and Safety Management Framework and aims to help improve the safety of all Northcott workers, including mental health.

In FY2023, we moved our workers compensation premium from the conventional model across to the Loss Prevention and Recoveries Scheme (LPR).

Northcott has a workplace safety culture that is committed to providing a workplace that is safe, have injury prevention strategies in place as well as an effective return-to-work process. The premium is now directly linked to our claims experience meaning the safer we keep our workforce, the better our return-to-work rates will be. This has been shown throughout FY2023 to have been a successful transition with our workers compensation premium down in line with industry standard.

We have continued to focus on incident reporting to better capture the whole picture of an incident and improve the mental health of staff who may have experience an emotional response to an incident.

Throughout the year the WHS team encouraged managers and employees to use the reporting system to enter incident reports when something happened as the process and information can benefit everyone.

The WHS team also focused on early intervention and injury management systems and processes, with the goal to minimise the severity of injuries and shortening the length of absenteeism from the workplace. As a result of this work there was a reduction in the number of days lost once a worker had been injured.

Our team completed workplace safety audits across the business focussing our high risk and critical sites. The audits were used as an opportunity to focus on sites having risk assessments for key tasks that they perform along with a focus on their safety training compliance. This WHS to reiterate the importance of assessing risk in everyday tasks and how they can assist workers to improve their work practices.

Ravi Bhati, Service Manager.

Congratulations to Ravi Bhati who awarded recognised as our Employee of the Year 2022.

Ravi has worked with Northcott since 2009, beginning as a support worker.

He has held several positions, including oordinator and service coordinator. Ravi is currently the Service Manager for South West Sydney.

Ravi continuously demonstrates the Northcott Values in his role as a Service Manager for accommodation services.

He consistently looks at positive options when moving our new customers into their home with Northcott. Ravi ensures customers are supported safely and comfortably.

Ravi is respectful of Northcott teams on every level. He supports process and drives positive change within his teams adding valuable contributions to sometimes difficult transitions.

An external Support Coordinator shared her experience about Ravi and his team saying how she and the family felt so welcome, adding how professional Ravi was whilst guiding and supporting his team, turning a potential stressful situation in to a very positive experience.

Ravi has been exceptional and went above and beyond throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Ravi has shown very strong leadership and commitment to the customers and the services across Northcott.

Well done to Ravi!