We strive to foster a culture that encourages excellence in our employees, our processes and our results.
Cultivating a Culture of Excellence
We aim to provide a workplace culture that leads employees to focus on priorities, make crisp decisions, be collaborative, think creatively and embrace accountability. To this end, we give individuals and teams the autonomy to take calculated risks and drive development of innovative products and solutions. By empowering employees, we believe we can best leverage their unique talents and abilities to support the company’s growth.
Gauging Employee Satisfaction
We value and respect our employees’ input and encourage them to share their thoughts and concerns. We regularly survey our employees, as well as solicit feedback through roundtables hosted by senior leaders, during global employee meetings and through our compliance hotline. In 2011, we surveyed our entire employee population to gauge their satisfaction with working at Biogen Idec. Among the findings:
- 96 percent of employees are proud to be associated with Biogen Idec.
- 90 percent would recommend Biogen Idec as a good place to work.
The high participation rate of 95 percent indicates employee’s desire to be heard and be part of driving our company. Additionally, the results of this survey showed that Biogen Idec employees are highly engaged, committed to patients and supportive of our strategic direction. While employees support the messages behind our culture of excellence, the survey revealed that they do not yet see the new culture as being fully integrated internally. As a result, in 2011 we established the Best Company Task Force, dedicated to advancing Biogen Idec’s workplace culture. The recommendations of the Task Force are being carried forward by our new head of Human Resources, who is now leading the effort to identify and develop programs, processes and infrastructure that can help empower employees at all levels build the overall capability of the organization and drive business results.
Additionally, the results showed that employees are sometimes challenged by maintaining a balance between work life and personal time. In response, we are putting more emphasis on existing work-life programs, as well as identifying and implementing structural and programmatic changes to address these concerns. Helping our employees to maintain a better work-life balance will be a focus area for us in 2012.
We believe the high level of employee satisfaction has been the main driver of our low voluntary turnover rate, which was 5.7 percent in 2011. Moving forward, we plan to continue to survey all our employees annually.
