We are inspiring our people

At Novartis, we see “Unleashing the Power of our People” as a key priority and as an important catalyst for driving innovation, performance and reputation, as well as enhancing our people’s work experience.

Our aspiration is to foster an Inspired, Curious and Unbossed environment where people can fulfill their potential, value diverse perspectives and ultimately bring their best self to work every day.

Choice with Responsibility

Our unbossed working environment is empowering people, where appropriate, with the freedom to choose how, where and when they work to make the most impact – offering greater flexibility to enhance wellbeing and collaboration.  For some time now, we’ve been exploring with our associates broader, more flexible working models that will support our culture aspirations, and support a resilient, future-ready workforce.

This new way of working is employee-led, manager enabled and team-aligned for effective collaboration and productivity. It is part of our data-driven multi-year journey towards a future working model that unlocks individual and team performance while fostering a sense of belonging, and a healthy work/life balance. We are proud to take the next step in pioneering the workplace of the future, and confident that together with our people, we can create an environment that works for all of our employees.

We support the mental health and well-being of our people through initiatives such as ‘Energized for Life” offering the tools and environment for our people to reduce stress levels, become more mindful, present and energetic.  Some of our key activities include:

• Health awareness: Skin and eye screenings, migraine care, flu vaccine
• Physical health: Walking meetings, healthy meals, yoga classes, office and mobile ergonomic tools to support flexible work spaces
• Mental Health: A mindfulness app, courses for understanding mental health, counseling services such as personal counseling to help cope with an illness or trauma
• Wellbeing assistance: Employee Assistance program to help people with personal difficulties before the problems negatively impact their work environment

Rewarding our people – we are appreciating and rewarding our people fairly, with financial and non-financial rewards and recognition that matters to the individual: 

• Spark - Our unbossed global recognition program, empowering associates to recognize and reward behaviors that spark success.
• Compensation - Our compensation system offers competitive compensation that is aligned with industry practice and supports the realization of our vision to be a trusted leader in changing the practice of medicine.

We also offer access to digital resources such as TIGNUM X to help our people and their loved ones thrive in a busy, complex world. It enables our people to self-observe, manage and sustain their impact, on themselves and on others. It helps them to purposefully manage their mental agility, performance resilience,

Empowering the individual

Making sure that each of our people feels confident that their voice is heard, their opinions matter and their perspectives are an integral part of our ability to develop new medicines for patients around the world. Our activities include:

• ‘OurVoice’: Quarterly employee surveys to check the pulse of our organization and make sure that we receive and action feedback to drive our Inspired, Curious, and Unbossed culture.
• Team perspectives: is a way of encouraging and enabling associates to provide feedback to their managers. It’s designed to support leader self-awareness, transparency and positive change through a more regular exchange of feedback on how managers’ leadership behaviors impact their associates’ work, wellbeing and shape the culture within the organization.
• ‘Live’ magazine: A weekly external digital magazine featuring news and topics related to Novartis. It also focuses on the people behind some of the biggest breakthroughs at the company, turning the spotlight on to individual skills and achievements.
• SpeakUp: The SpeakUp Office provides a safe place where anyone, internal and external, can raise concerns about misconduct/unethical behavior at Novartis.
• Xchange: an online platform to help our people from all over the world connect in new ways. Through Xchange we can collaborate with colleagues, learn about new cultures, travel the world while at home, organize after work events with colleagues, set up a linguistic exchange for children, boost foreign conversation skills, offer a relocation buddy service and more!
• @NovartisLife Channel : An Instagram channel where we celebrate our people by sharing their inspired, curious and unbossed moments.

Parental Leave: One of the most life-changing moments our associates experience is becoming a parent and welcoming new life into their lives. In July 2019, we introduced equal paid parental leave of at least 14 weeks to all parents, regardless of gender. We believe that this will empower our people to make the right choices for the health and well-being of their families, by enjoying more flexibility and financial stability, at the times when it matters the most.