Top Blokes Foundation

BACKGROUND

Top Blokes Foundation is a preventative, evidence-based group mentoring organisation on a mission to improve young male health and well-being. With its expansion across various locations in NSW since 2017, Top Blokes Foundation has doubled in employee size and has recently opened its establishment in Queensland in 2020.

CHALLENGE

With the growing operations across NSW, Top Blokes Foundation sought a dedicated HR professional to help in embedding HR fundamentals and implementing effective measures of people management within the business.

Conducting an ‘Absorbed’ approach, with HR responsibilities shared by the Head of Operations and CEO, Top Blokes Foundation were finding themselves unable to dedicate their attention to thinking strategically about their growing workforce. The engagement of a trusted partner like Employment Innovations was essential as areas of concern were becoming visible including;

• The need for an e-learning platform;
• lack of online HR templates in an HRIS portal;
• an inconsistency of HR policies; and
• uncertainty of award interpretation and legislation.

SOLUTION

The team at Employment Innovations has worked closely with Top Blokes Foundation to alleviate the internal pressures of managing a growing workforce and embed the fundamentals of a healthy HR function. Within weeks, Employment Innovations became a sounding board in addressing Fair Work legislative concerns, award interpretation and implementing consistent HR policies and contracts within their HRIS. Additionally, key priorities were addressed including;

• Support in navigating the new Employment Hero portal;
• Support in learning and development;
• Implementation of a wellness and culture survey;
• Digitalising and streamlining the induction and onboarding process;
• Development of a strategic 12 month HR strategy to define clear direction and objectives.

One of many significant outcomes achieved was a wellbeing and culture plan that aided in promoting positive wellbeing at Top Blokes Foundation, and helped in building stronger relationships with colleagues. The plan deep dived into ways to improve communication, identifying job roles and expectations and discovering strategies to promote positive wellbeing amongst teams.

RESULT

As we continue rolling out HR objectives for Top Blokes Foundation, employee happiness has significantly improved. It subsequently has enabled the team to identify trends of what may need improvement within the organisation.

Some key results worth celebrating comprise of:

• Implementation of a One Page HR plan identifying key priorities for the next 12 months in light of the organisation’s overall priorities;
• Standardised key company policies in a clear and concise way;
• Leadership coaching (for example, approaches to managing difficult conversations);
• Increased retention rate and no loss of staff during COVID-19;
• Maintenance of employee happiness despite COVID-19 by implementing engagement strategies;
• Low turnover rate of 5%.

The team at Employment Innovations have taken a continuous improvement approach to HR at Top Blokes Foundation, making small incremental changes to improve the health of HR. These changes have seen a real impact on the way HR is delivered within the organisation.