How do you ensure that junior employees contribute their ideas?

Terrific question. Success in this space relies on a combination of both culture and structure. From a cultural viewpoint, ensuring that all of our people (including those in the early career stage) have opportunities to safely and confidently express their ideas and be heard relies very much on the organisation’s leaders fostering two-way communication, with this being a skill we support our leaders with developing through our many leadership development training offerings.

IGO’s overarching values are also key in fostering a culture of open communication, in particular our value “Be better together”, which is all about empowering, supporting and respecting each other.

As to IGO’s structures and processes that support people in contributing their ideas, a number of formal channels are key, including our engagement survey, our graduate program – which involves graduates working on business improvement projects and presenting their findings and ideas back to the business, and our various multidisciplinary working groups, which are structured to include balanced representation of business units, genders, disciplines and career levels – a good example of this is our psychosocial harms working group.

More generally however, the size of IGO’s workforce of around 700 people makes it feasible for everyone in the business to have opportunities to engage and collaborate with a wide range of people across the business, including contributing their ideas.