MEDIA RELEASE.
The co-operative won both the Organisational Change and Development Award and the Best Wellness Programme Award at the 2020 NZ HR awards.
The awards, organised by HRNZ, recognise excellence in human resources practice and the HR leaders who are helping shape the profession and celebrate people powered success.
LIC, the largest herd improvement and agri-tech co-operative in New Zealand, employs 800 permanent staff and 2000 seasonal workers.
The cooperative has achieved positive financial results in all of the previous four years, a significant turnaround after recording a loss in 2016. Last year it delivered a $15.6 million dividend to its 10,300 shareholders, the largest paid out since 2013.
Chief Executive Wayne McNee believes creating a supportive and sustainable internal culture has been vital to achieving the successful results seen in recent years, and winning the awards.
“Our business position is healthy now but four years ago we had our first ever loss and paid no dividend to farmer shareholders. We knew we needed to transform our business to create a more productive and sustainable future,” said McNee.
“Our people were purposefully involved from the start, from generating ideas that could yield revenue to ways to drive efficiencies and improve our organisational health.”
Chief People Officer Roz Urbahn believes introducing the ‘Well Aware’ programme, which supports employee resilience and psychological wellbeing from within the business, has even further improved the internal culture within LIC over the last 12 months.
“The aim of the programme was to make sure our employees thrive within a work environment that holistically supports and promotes their health and wellbeing, leading to an engaged, safe and sustainably high-performing workforce.
“We’ve seen outstanding results and shifts in behaviours, knowledge and employee engagement as well as more requests for employee resilience and psychological wellbeing support from both employees and managers.”
The wellbeing programme was launched in June 2019 and workshops started a month later. Feedback from the workshops was incredibly positive with 80% of LIC taking part.
The agri-tech cooperative beat out a number of other worthy nominees in both categories to win the award, including Coca Cola and Xero with the overall winners celebrated here: https://hrnz.org.nz/nz-hr-awards
Organisational Change and Development Award
Chief Executive Wayne McNee believes creating a supportive and sustainable internal culture has been vital to achieving the successful results seen in recent years, and winning the awards.
Best Wellness Programme
Chief People Officer Roz Urbahn believes introducing the ‘Well Aware’ programme, which supports employee resilience and psychological wellbeing from within the business, has even further improved the internal culture within LIC over the last 12 months.
