Do your employee experience efforts cater to the diverse workforce that make up your organisations ecosystem? This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast looks into this question through the lens of Heidi Manna, Chief People Officer at Jazz Pharmaceuticals.  

Through innovative employee listening strategies and data-driven approaches, Heidi has achieved great success creating an inclusive employee experience amongst the disparate teams at Jazz Pharmaceuticals. So tune in to learn more about: 

• How Jazz Pharmaceuticals listens to its employees and crafts a clear value proposition to drive engagement and satisfaction. 

• The company’s Flexible Work Model and its approach towards intentional collaboration.  

• Insights into the metrics and methods used to evaluate the effectiveness of its flexible work model and employee experience strategies. 

• Strategies for constructing a compelling business case for flexible work models and gaining support from the C-suite. 

• How Jazz Pharmaceuticals ensures a positive experience for all employees, including those in on-site and customer-facing roles. 

• Heidi’s key takeaways on maintaining clarity, adaptability, and a growth mindset to foster a robust and inclusive workplace. 

If you are a HR Leader looking to elevate your employee experience strategies, this episode promises to be an inspirational listen.  

Support from this podcast comes from HiBob, who brings us Bob, the most usable enterprise HCM according to Nucleus Research. Bob, is rated the most useable HCM solution in Nucleus Research's 2024 Enterprise HCM Value Matrix.  

Bob delivers tangible results for organizations through ease of use and fast setup, like for this US-based CRM vendor that achieved a 228% ROI. Need proof? Read how Bob increased productivity and reduced software costs by downloading the Nucleus ROI study here.  

Links to Resources: 

• Heidi Manna on LinkedIn: Heidi Manna 

• Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Jazz Pharmaceuticals 

• HiBob Platform: HiBob 

• MyHRFuture Academy: MyHRFuture 

• Insight222: Insight222 

[0:00:00] David Green: Despite one research study from TI People, the State of EX 2024, finding 300% ROI from investments in employee experience and company culture, less than half of organisations are optimising their EX management.  But in an era where our workforce is more distributed than ever, with most organisations juggling on-site, remote and hybrid teams, understanding the employee experience of each of these personas and ensuring that they are aligned is crucial to business success.   

So today, I've invited Heidi Manna, Chief People Officer at Jazz Pharmaceuticals and a valued client of Insight222, to join us to share her expertise on how Jazz is ensuring inclusivity in employee experiences across an organisation that spans flexible working arrangements.  We'll explore the importance of intentional collaboration, the strategies to ensure inclusivity for distributed teams and employees, and the metrics used to measure the impact of these efforts.  We'll also delve into how Heidi built the business case for Jazz's flexible work model to gain executive support, and hear her advice for HR leaders looking to enhance their employee experience strategy.  With that, let's get the conversation started.   

Heidi, welcome to the show.  I'm excited to talk to you today as a client of the Insight222 People Analytics Programme and the Chief People Officer at Jazz Pharmaceuticals.  I know that you are making a significant impact in the employee experience space.  Could you start first, please, by giving a brief overview of Jazz Pharmaceuticals and your role within the organisation? 

[0:01:57] Heidi Manna: Yes, David, I want to thank you for having me.  It's an absolute pleasure to be here.  I'm excited to share some more things that we're doing at Jazz Pharmaceuticals, but let me start by telling you a little bit about Jazz and myself.  Jazz is a mid-sized growing biopharmaceutical company.  We are fully integrated, we are global, we have a host of marketed products, and we have a host of products and novel products in our R&D pipeline.  We tend to focus on rare disease states.  We like areas that are complex and hard to treat.  We really home in on patients that have limited or no treatment options.   

We're about a 21-year-old company, we're founder-led still, which is really interesting and a fun place to be, and we've got about 3,000 employees across the globe.  We have major employee populations at some of our sites, ranging from Palo Alto, California to Philadelphia, PA -- I'm outside Philadelphia -- to Dublin, Ireland, we have a host of sites in the UK.  We've got some of our manufacturing in the UK, Ireland, and Italy, and then we have small pockets of employees in areas of the US and other parts of the EU.   

I've been the CPO, or the Chief People Officer, at Jazz for a little over five years, when I had the opportunity to find this gem of a company.  And typical sort of accountabilities, I think about all things related to HR and all things talent, people, culture, engagement, and I also have oversight for our internal employee communications here at Jazz. 

[0:03:41] David Green: Brilliant.  And what a five years to be a Chief People Officer.  There's been so much change, obviously the pandemic, but there's so much change happening, isn't there?  I mean, when I speak to some of your peers in other organisations, the role of the Chief People Officer is becoming more and more important and strategic to the organisation.  I'd love to get your reflections on that. 

[0:04:02] Heidi Manna: Yeah.  I mean I would say, to your point, David, this has been the most interesting five years of my career, and not just because of being with this company, but really the state of what happened during this five years and how dramatically things are evolving.  And the thing that we talk about a lot is, what we navigate is unprecedented oftentimes, and so this ability to kind of navigate the here and now and, yes, draw on your experiences, but realise that the playbook that you have just isn't going to be a playbook that you can always use because things are just simply different. 

[0:04:37] David Green: And one of the big focuses during the pandemic, and it's certainly something that seems to have continued afterwards, which is great, and I know it's certainly the case at Jazz Pharmaceuticals, is that focus around employee experience.  Now, when I speak to your peers, the Chief People Officers, and people focusing on employee experience in different organisations, there seems to be many different definitions around what employee experience is.  So, at Jazz Pharmaceuticals, what does employee experience mean to you? 

[0:05:05] Heidi Manna: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head.  It's so varied.  And when I think of it at its core, I start here to say, the employee experience to me is just simply, what do your employees say that it is?  So, an active part of that is really listening.  And there could be threads that are consistent across your employee base, but oftentimes it's just that unique experience that they're having in a personal way.  So, having the ability to be able to really listen is important, but I would say, David, also as a Chief People Officer, it's super-important for me and others to have a very clear vision of what you want to be, and what is that notion and that value proposition, if you will, that makes you different and unique and being clear about that, developing strategies to bring it to life and importantly, having proof points in your organisation that sort of demonstrate that.   

I'll say I think the Jazz origin story is important to what employee experience means here.  I referenced that we have a founder CEO, and it is a man by the name of Bruce Cozadd, who's still our CEO.  And when he tells his story about how he founded the company, what's really unique is it was not founded based on a product.  He didn't have a product in mind.  What he had in mind was creating a truly authentic, patient-driven, purpose-driven culture that really had that connection with patients, and making sure that he could create a culture for his employees that truly was a great place to work.  And so those cultural cornerstones, we call them, are still very much alive and well today.  And I think one of the things that we do a lot of here is figuring out how do we preserve that uniqueness that we have, and what do we need to do to keep evolving to make sure that we best live into that?   

Then, based on some of our input of employees, what I've been able to do with the organisation is get a little bit more clear on that unique value proposition that makes Jazz a great place to work.  And I'll share the four tenets to that.  We really aspire to be that best experience that an employee has had in their career.  And four elements are: first, putting people in our organisation and patients first and making sure that we're highly connected with them; the second is really creating an environment where our employees can learn and grow and thrive and do their best work; the third pillar is around flexibility.  We have a pretty strong belief here that flexibility actually benefits the business and our ability to serve our patients, and it allows employees to have a better work-life integration experience as well.  And then, the last pillar that we have is around caring for the wellbeing, and we think about wellbeing in a really holistic way, what is that sort of financial, physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing, and what are the things that we can do to create that culture of care? 

[0:08:14] David Green: Double-clicking maybe on the flexibility pillar, you talked about how that benefits your patients, but also benefits employees, which I think is a great way of looking at it.  Can you tell us more about your hybrid model, flexible work model, I think, as you call it? 

[0:08:30] Heidi Manna: Yeah, with pleasure, because this has been really fun to be able to innovate.  I do think this is an area where we've been very innovative.  And let me tell you a little bit more about it, but I'll start with maybe how it's different.  As you know, a lot of companies are coming back and that hybrid is in the form of something like three days per week, right, having employees in.  And that's not our model.  Our model is actually built on being very flexible, a greater degree of flexibility in terms of where and how work gets done.  And we talk about this dynamic use of work locations and schedules to see what makes the most sense, but let me give it some flavour.   

So, what does that really mean in positions that don't require you to be on site?  Obviously manufacturing, some positions, not all positions are the same, but we had a lot of our formerly office-based positions, where we learned that a lot of that individual work could be done remotely.  So, we're anchored to the individual type of work we can continue to do remote.  We do have offices still, but we leverage those offices in a very deliberate way.  We leverage them for intentional innovation, collaboration, connectivity, building relationships, and we don't prescribe set days per week for employees to come in.  So, we've empowered our people and our teams to come together and really determine what makes sense for them in terms of how they work together, of how they're going to use times for in-person and times for virtual collaboration.   

I think the last thing that I'll mention about our model is, in order to have a model like this, you have to believe that culture is very pervasive and culture can be built both in person and virtually.  And something about our workforce, we lend ourselves well to a hybrid because we're very distributed, right?  We're very global, we're very distributed, we work across time zones.  So, although getting together in person is important as well, we knew that we had to learn to work really well both ways and we've really embraced it rather than shied away from it.   

[0:10:45] David Green: Did you start your flexible work model with intentional collaboration from the start, or did you have some trial and error maybe when you were deciding how to best approach the model within Jazz Pharmaceuticals? 

[0:12:28] Heidi Manna: I think you raise a great point, just to double-click on your point about teams can figure it out, you know, they've done it better than I even thought they would be able to do it.  Sometimes people want rules and when you give principles, but they've actually navigated it really well, and I think it's because we have these premises and beliefs.  And to your question about intentional collaboration, yes, we did talk about that from the start, but I want to double-click on something you said about adapting.  We were very clear from the beginning that we were doing something different and that we were going to learn and adapt as we went along.  So, we were also pretty clear that we weren't going to follow other companies, we were going to do what makes sense for us.  But we never said, "Hey, this is the way that it's going to be".  We said very clearly, "We're going to continue to live into these principles, but as we get feedback and as we learn, we're going to incorporate that and evolve the model".   

I think important to that is to say we engage our employees a lot, both in shaping the model as well as getting their feedback along the way.  And we tend to do a lot of different listening in different ways, either through pulse surveys or leader listening sessions or focus groups, or even our employee resource groups are set up in a little bit of a different way.  We have one that's inclusive of everyone, and we call it Innovation for Inclusion.  And we actually go to them with different either patient problems or business problems or employee problems, and they help us troubleshoot solutions for them.  So, we've used that engine and created that employee listening engine.  And I would say we've learned, maybe David, a couple of things in the last couple of years about our flexible work model.  The first was this notion of virtual collaboration.  What they told us was, "Look, we learned a lot during the pandemic and we actually got better globally.  But when we're working remote a lot, we find ourselves in a lot of meetings", and the typical, "There's not enough time", and it's been really fascinating.   

MS Teams is an incredibly powerful tool and really using all of the elements.  And we've been on a journey in partnership with our IT group to help unpack those tools and get our employees using them.  And part of its technology, part of its mindset shifts, getting them off of email, getting them on that chat function.  You've even seen the language change within our organisation.  You hear people talking about, "Can we do this async?" which is code for, "Do we need a meeting to actually set up to do this; or, can we use the Teams platform to actually do this asynchronously and collaborate virtually at a time and place when it makes sense for somebody who's over, you know, in the UK working with someone who's on the West Coast?"  So, that's been a huge unlock.   

The second learning that we had is, while our employees really appreciate the remote work, they also really appreciate being together.  And what we learned was the teams, intact teams, had figured it out, and they'd figured out how and when do we come together, but they missed those cross-functional collaborations that you get.  And so, we've been doing some work to figure out, how do we help teams actually be more deliberate in when they are going into the office, so that they are aware when other teams are coming in and they're doing things like mixers and cross-collaboration?  And then we, within my HR group, are also helping do things like community days and site days.  So, we're doing a little bit of both in order to get more of that cross-functional connection and team spirit, if you will. 

[0:16:13] David Green: In terms of with your flexible work model, what are some of the things you're doing?  You mentioned some of the focus groups that you're doing and obviously surveys, but what are some of the things that you're looking at in terms of that, so you know that it's working, and support how you can maybe continually iterate it as you move forward? 

[0:16:34] Heidi Manna: Yeah, thank you for repeating that.  So, one of the things that we did about close to a year ago, we had it in place, and I talked about that we do periodic pulse surveys.  We used to do once a year like everyone else, and then we really revamped our employee listening to say, "We want to be talking to our employees really regularly".  So, we might do multiple pulse surveys.  We do a core set of questions, and we get very specific.  So, we did a really specific survey on our work model to say, "Help us understand how this is impacting a whole series of dimensions, how you feel about working, your productivity, all of those things?"  And what I would say that was just really interesting was, we found a number of different things from that.   

We asked them to compare, how did they think about work before the model and how did they think about it after, and how did that impact certain things?  And I'll pull out a couple of stats related to that.  80%, David, of our employees said that this model gave them a greater ability to work in a flexible way; 77% said they had a greater sense of happiness as a result of this work model; 76% said it has a positive impact on their intent to stay; and then 79% said they just had a general greater sense of satisfaction at working at Jazz because of that.  So, that was really great data to get.   

But what I really love more than anything, to be very honest, is the harder metrics that we've looked at, and let me tell you a few of those.  Voluntary turnover in the last couple of years, ours has actually decreased by 6%.  Now, we were always a little bit below the life science industry average, but 6 percentage points is a significant drop.  And we're running right now at a turnover, voluntary turnover, of something like 6% or 7%; it's really low.  And I know you had Nick Bloom on your podcast, and when I think about what Nick Bloom talks about, and he's obviously an expert in this area and researches it a lot, the opportunity cost and the savings, that's about 200 leavers that didn't happen at Jazz.  That translates, if you take the way you look at it of it costs about half of someone's salary, that translates to $15 million that you can redeploy into the business and invest where it matters the most.   

The other bit that I would say, in terms of hard metrics, is it has opened up the talent marketplace for us, and we've really learned that it's been quite incredible.  Despite having fewer roles in the last couple of years that we're recruiting for, our applicant pool last year increased by 13%.  We know that we're getting better access to talent, we know that we're getting better access to diverse talent.  In fact, just a couple of weeks ago or a couple of months ago, we had a Head of People Analytics that we posted.  We had 400 applicants in one week.  60% of those were people that just were more than 100 miles from one of our work locations.  So, opening it up gives you this incredible plethora of talent to choose from.  So, it's been exciting to really be able to reap these compelling business benefits from the model.   

[0:20:06] David Green: Really interesting and great example of the Head of People Analytics role, because obviously we don't just have people analytics professionals listening to this podcast, but we do have a fair few people analysts professionals listening to this podcast, so really interesting.  And some of those hard metrics, I think, as well as the engagement style stuff that you mentioned there, it's very popular with employees.  Obviously, you've translated that into business metrics as well.  That's really interesting.  Then we kind of move to the next layer, which I guess is your colleagues in the C-suite.  So, in our Insight222 People Analytics Trends research that we do on an annual basis, we found that the importance of developing relationships with C-suite and senior stakeholders is essential for HR and people analytics functions to deliver value and deliver on key business priorities.   

You probably highlighted some of the metrics that have certainly supported the continuance of your flexible work model, but can you share with listeners how you built that initial business case to influence the executive committee to buy into this approach to flexible working? 

[0:21:12] Heidi Manna: I think that's actually probably the most interesting part of this story.  What I'll share is, this was not an obvious work solution that we were going to put in place.  I did not have my C-suite nor my CEO pounding and saying, "Heidi, by the way, put this new model in place".  So, let me tell you a little bit about that process and how it came to be, because I think it's super-interesting.  I think it started during the pandemic, let's start there.  We had two big learnings, and many companies had this.  We were amazed at what we were able to do during this, and arguably this may have been a peak productivity period for this company.  We had done things during this period that we had never done before.  We were launching multiple products, we really hadn't even launched a ton of products before.  I think there were four or five that we launched during this.  We also did the biggest acquisition of our company's history.  We doubled the size of the company during this.  And we knew that we were a better global organisation, that inclusivity in the way that Zoom democratised all that cross-functional.  So, we appreciated and had learned that.  We also learned and appreciated and accepted that people just didn't want to come back in the same way that they did before.  But I'm going to share with you a little bit about Bruce.   

Bruce is an incredibly inspirational, connected CEO to the people.  And there is nothing that gives him more joy than being with our employees and connecting with them in person.  He is an extrovert on the highest degree, and so he could not wait to get our employees back in the office.  But we asked really specific questions around, "What do you want after we come out of this?  What does the world look like?" and we just weren't afraid to be really specific  So, I knew things like I knew they didn't want to come in three days a week, they were very clear on that.  92% of them said, "We prefer to stay remote for most of our work, but we do also want to connect".  They didn't say that they don't want to connect any more, they also told us that continuing to connect was important.  And then we brought in a bunch of demographics, I'll say, that we're important to influencing this.   

When we looked at our teams, 65% of our leadership teams were already distributed in nature.  When you look at our workforce, we actually are a mid-career hire, older workforce.  Our average age is in the late 40s, right?  So, we don't have this plethora of entry-level talent that really needs that in-person mentoring.  These people typically are knowing how to do their roles and can do them pretty effectively.  And then we looked at commute time.  It was eye-opening to see that 75% of our employees, because we're located near big cities, they were commuting over an hour every day, and they didn't want to give up that productivity and that quality of life that they had.  And then we brought in some external research and we started to just have dialogues.   

I think what really was helpful with the senior leadership team is just starting to anchor to a set of principles that we talked about, and getting them aligned.  So, it's a little bit of an OD intervention with the power of employee data; and then I will say, with the power of a CEO who truly, truly cares and was willing to be adaptable to do the right thing.  This wouldn't have been the work model that he chose that's most inspirational to him, but he understands how compelling it is, and he understands that it's actually helped drive our business performance.  So that, kind of in a nutshell, believe me it was a long process, but I will say universally they are highly aligned, they understand the value of it, and they've worked with their teams to make it really compelling here. 

[0:25:12] David Green: You mentioned earlier as well, Heidi, that obviously as a pharmaceutical company, you have sales teams who need to be obviously with customers, manufacturing workers also who tend to be more on site.  I wonder, how do you ensure that inclusivity in employee experience for those that are required to maybe be on site or on customer premises maybe full-time or close to full-time? 

[0:26:28] Heidi Manna: Yeah, that's a great question.  And I know a lot of my colleagues and peers, when we talk about leaders can get stuck in this concept of fairness, you have to do the same thing for everyone, and we've never anchored to that.  We've anchored to a principle of, here are things that we want to do for our employees, and being very transparent to acknowledge some roles are not conducive.  And to be very honest, David, I think our employees are so committed to our purpose and our patients.  When you think about our manufacturing sites, when I watched them during the pandemic, it was incredible what they did to make sure that our supply continued, to keep themselves safe, to work as self-empowered teams, to help each other out on shifts and people that they had to care for.  You remember what it was like during this time.  They were incredibly passionate about making sure that they protected our patients and each other.   

I think what some of the leaders that I have in that part of the group is, that play voice, and even talking to them about the notion of flexibility, they in fact put in just adjusting start and end times, because they had some dialogue with some of our manufacturing folks, really made a huge impact on flexibility for them and allowed them to have their version of a work model that could help them be a better version, both at work and at home. 

[0:27:57] David Green: I wonder if you could maybe elaborate a little bit further on some of the specific metrics or methods that you use to measure and demonstrate the business impact of employee experience, not just around flexible working, but some of the other elements of employee experience you mentioned at the start? 

[0:28:13] Heidi Manna: Yeah, we talked a lot about, we obviously look at our turnover, are we able to attract, retain?  I think there's a standard set of questions that is very authentic to Jazz and what we stand for.  So, for example, we are regularly asking, are employees connected to our purpose?  Do they feel this is a good place to work?  Those are the core tenets of who we want to be, and I'm pleased to be able to say that we consistently get over 80% or 85% of favourable responses there.  And then I think to drill down on that employee listening strategy, there's elements of your culture that you're often trying to evolve.  You're not just trying to preserve, right, you're often trying to think about what you have to evolve.  And when I think about Jazz, we're trying to dial up that performance-driven, that company that's grown really fast and it's scaled.   

If you think about, we call it our operating culture, the way that you do work, if you think about that fast growth and scaling, you often have to shift your processes, you have to shift, how do you simplify things?  How do you work across a matrix?  And so, we do spend a lot of time also trying to get underneath, what are the ways that we have to shift the way that we're working, whether it's mindset shifts or actual hard processes or governance, and using our employees and getting very specific on understanding how we're doing.  And then when we're putting something in place, what did we learn?  What's the feedback that you can give us?  And we use it in a host of different dimensions, sometimes surveys, sometimes when we have these connections days, for example, we have leader listening sessions.  So, we're having a very specific topic that we're bringing in employees to talk to our leaders on.  So, we're just making sure that we're having this really rapid surround-sound dialogue and communication that's happening. 

[0:30:17] David Green: Yeah, and I suppose ultimately with listening, it's all about action.  It'll show that you're listening, communicating that you've taken action, measuring the impact, and it sounds like you're doing that.  You're not just listening for the sake of listening, you're actually listening and then taking action and communicating you're taking action, based on that listening as well, which is so important, isn't it?   

[0:30:41] Heidi Manna: The thing that surprised me, David, that has been interesting is, I always had this belief that engagement surveys, you can't change the inflection that much and you shouldn't do it so periodically.  It's actually disrupted my belief in that, because what I see in doing these pulse surveys is, so for example, there was a period where we had a little lower belonging score than we wanted.  And we acknowledged that, we did a bunch of actions, and I think it was less than six months, we did it again and we saw it jump like 10 percentage points.  So, it's amazing to me how actually much you can move the needle on some of these things when you have a really concerted effort of engagement. 

[0:31:25] Heidi Manna: If you could give one piece of advice to other HR leaders looking to improve their employee experience within distributed teams, what would it be?   

[0:31:36] Heidi Manna: Yeah, I'm not sure there's a silver bullet.  That said, I'm going to double down on something that I've been talking about.  I think the heart of it is really around your voice of your employees, and that's such an important part of the culture and thinking about disparate teams.  And if you are committed to really listening, learning, adapting, giving tools, because it's not only in HR that you're collecting this information, but giving tools to leaders and teams to be able to facilitate great conversations so that you're getting the part of, "Hey, what's working and what's not working?" and it's just simple communication. 

I'll tell one other quick story to just bring this to life of the power of just quick communication.  Right after we put in the work model, I was at a global leadership team event.  We brought our 100 leaders together and I was talking to one of our VPs who was high performing, high potential, and we were talking about this work model.  And he was telling me about that he was really challenged, that he was feeling like, "I just think we could be doing more to build connectivity".  And so, we had this wonderful conversation and I said to him, "You know what, let's do a focus group together.  When we get back to Philly, let's you and I get a group of employees.  Are you game for this?" and he said, "Sure, absolutely".  It didn't take us that long, we bring in 45 minutes, and the silver bullet that I got from that conversation of asking employees, "What could we do to drive a better sense of connection and belonging?" they gave me this nugget that I would have never thought of on my own.   

We were setting up in each of our sites connection days and we were doing them on different days.  And they said to us, "We're having trouble because what's happening is when we're coming in to connect on the site, because our teams are in other sites, we're getting pulled into meetings and we're ending up going into Zoom meetings when we want to be engaging with people.  Hey, what about if we did global connection days and we had everybody do it on the same day?"  And it was this sort of, "Duh, aha, what a great idea that I wouldn't have come up with on my own!"  And so, to me that advice is, you've got to really ask, you've got to be tenacious, you have to ask in multiple ways, don't just rely on surveys, talk to people, great ideas come from the dialogue that you engage in with your employees. 

[0:33:58] David Green: Specifically around employee experience and culture, again any sort of tips or lessons that you've learned from trying to do that, because obviously you're bringing two companies together, two cultures, two different ways of doing things; how do you bring that together?   

[0:34:17] Heidi Manna: Today, without the limitations of the pandemic, we would definitely be doing more in person and we'd be going to those employees.  What we did is we used the tools that we had, the principles that we had around engaging.  And I can remember those strategies that you have around, "Okay, how are we going to talk to big groups?  How are we going to create the power of what Jazz has, the authenticity of Bruce and the power of Bruce and engaging?"  We did it virtually, and we'd learned how to do that better virtually.  We did one-on-ones.  We made sure that we were just doing everything that we could to engage, let them understand what was important to us, and communicate, communicate, and just use your virtual platforms.   

[0:35:03] David Green: Future.  So, let's see, what are Jazz Pharmaceutical's future plans and initiatives to further enhance employee experience and maintain that obvious positive organisational culture that you've got? 

[0:35:17] Heidi Manna: Well, look, I think we're going to remain very clear and committed to the tenets of our culture, that patient purpose-driven, that people orientation, and also being performance-driven, right, and growing as a company.  We will continue to have this dialogue.  We talk a lot about a growth mindset and what that means obviously of adapting, how do we become better, based on listening, based on trying things?  We will continue to double down on that best experience and some of those elements.  A few areas that we didn't talk about but we touched on a little bit in that employee value proposition, I'm proud of our DEIB agenda and the impact that that has.  We talked a little bit about the different approach to our employee resource groups and the power that that has, both on our employees as well as the business.  I'm proud to be able to say, in our employee resource groups, we've got a third of our population, employee population participating, which is pretty high.   

Our belief is that diverse teams do impact the business and that diversity is very, very important.  And we've been pretty aspirational with some goals that we put out a number of years ago.  We looked at our leadership and said we'd like that to have a better representative, diverse makeup.  And we said, by 2025, we would love to get to gender parity across leadership roles at executive director and above, and we'd love to have our people of colour be more in the area of 25%, 30%.  And look, we're at 47% of females in our executive director and above roles today, and about 21% people of colour, so we've made some dramatic increase in those areas as well, and we just know that that really sets the environment for a more inclusive organisation where different ideas and different points of view get out on the table more.   

So, I think the last area that we'll focus on is really that health and wellbeing and continuing to double down, whether it's flexibility or mental health, I think, is a really important area for us to continue to support and get focused on. 

[0:37:32] David Green: So now, this is the question of the series, Heidi.  So, this is a question we're asking everyone on this series of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, and please feel free to reiterate things that you've already talked about because we've really been talking about this in detail.  What are the key elements that you believe are essential to building a strong company culture?   

[0:37:51] Heidi Manna: I think it's that clarity; know who you are and know what you stand for.  And again, for us, it's patients, it's our values, it's being a great place to work and that best experience of your career.  But probably more importantly, understand how you're living into that and understand what's serving you well, and sometimes there's stuff that you need to shift and it's not serving you well.  And have the courage to ask the hard questions, the conviction to have the dialogue and sometimes give feedback that people don't want to hear, and have the accountability to pull it through.  We do things periodically, like a culture diagnostic, and that is a way that we're basically saying, "Hey, senior leaders, this is what you're saying you want to be.  Now let me tell you how your employees are experiencing the environment".  And while we share a lot of great things, we home in on that part around what isn't serving us well and what do we want to do to shift that.  So, that would be my view on that. 

[0:39:00] David Green: No, it's a good answer, and it sounds like you've got, in Bruce, a CEO that really puts culture at the centre of what you're doing as an organisation, which clearly helps, but it's a really important element I think there that you mention.  That's really good.  Heidi, can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow all the great work that you're doing at Jazz Pharmaceuticals?   

[0:39:24] Heidi Manna: If you want more information about Jazz and the work that we're doing around our purpose every day to transform the lives of patients and their families, I would ask people to please visit jazzpharma.com or check us out on LinkedIn. 

[0:39:38] David Green: Well, Heidi, thank you very much again.  Really enjoyed the conversation and hopefully, next time I'm in Philadelphia or at an HR conference in the US, or you're over here, hopefully we'll get a chance to meet face to face as well.  So, thank you very much for sharing your story with our listeners.   

[0:39:53] Heidi Manna: Thank you, David, it's been my pleasure and I would love to connect in person if you're here or when I'm out on the other side of the pond.