PAIG co-chairs reflect on industry progress in D&I with sights set on next phase goals

Human Resources: In this Health Industry Hub podcast, Medicines Australia’s PAIG (Pharma Australia Inclusion Group) co-chairs reflect on their contribution during the uncertainties of 2020-2021, the key highlights and pharma industry accomplishments in diversity and inclusion (D&I), and the themes that will drive PAIG’s agenda for the next two years.

Fiona Sheppard is a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Leader at Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies and Lee Davelaar is the Strategic Policy Manager at Pfizer.

In considering the PAIG program in the last two years, Fiona commented “What is highlighted is that we still have a lot of work to do. Whilst we have a two year program and we’ve focused on flex, gender, First Nations, inclusion and mental health, we’re all on varying parts of the journey and there’s a lot to learn from each other. But we haven’t shifted the dial far enough on all of these things so that when they reset, they reset at a better place than where we were pre-COVID.”

“The mental health sessions and the First Nations sessions that we ran were definitely, I would say, the highlights from the two year program,” Fiona continued.

Lee discussed the PAIG leader’s workshop and the insights that will lead the program direction in 2022-2023. “A lot of organisations and members put their hand up and said we want deeper insights [in D&I]. They didn’t want to necessarily broaden the PAIG remit too much. We heard from organisations that they want to look at how they can see a commercial alignment with D&I objectives. There is still a great interest in hybrid and flexible working, and that the amalgamation of what we’re going to do in 2022 in terms of working from home and working in the office and how that’s going to work.”

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He added “The development of the whitepaper is going to be a collaborative venture. We’re really excited that it’s now a piece of work with the University of Sydney Business School and PAIG project partner Willis Towers Watson. The research will be led by Professor Rae Cooper, Professor of Gender, Work and Employment Relations at the University of Sydney and undertaken by Troy Roderick, a Sydney Policy Lab fellow so passionate about this area. We expect to be able to be in a position to launch that late Jan – early Feb because that’s going to provide a platform for a lot of the 2022-2023 work for PAIG.”