For Matt Zeller, who heads a team of more than 300 people across Australia and New Zealand, his number one priority in life is being there for his family as a father and husband.
Zeller is an executive at Novartis, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical corporations, and his mission is not just ensuring that his teams excel at work but that they feel valued and supported in a way that also allows them to fulfill their responsibilities outside the office.
“Family is the most important thing in my life,” Zeller tells Women’s Agenda.
“I take my job very seriously, but my family comes number one always.”
Novartis is a founding partner of the Family Friendly Workplaces initiative that began in 2021.
Zeller also recently became a family-friendly workplaces ambassador and is a leading advocate in this space.
The organisation has fluid, gender-neutral policies around parental leave, flexibility and other supports in place to ensure staff don’t have to sacrifice their careers when care obligations emerge in their lives.
Zeller says well-designed HR policies form just part of what’s needed to make a workplace family-friendly.
For employees to feel empowered and safe to raise what’s happening at home and actually make use of things like paid parental leave, he says the culture and actions of leaders at all levels matters.
That’s why he speaks so openly about his value of family and encourages others on the team to do so too.
“The environment that we’re building here at Novartis ANZ is one where it’s not about optimising for a week or a month or a short-term deadline,” he says.
“It’s about building this long-term continuity and this long-term vision together where we’re all buying into the same idea about what it looks like to be successful.
“And it’s not just successful professionally, it’s also personally because increasingly more and more, all these things get wrapped up together.
“At the end of the day, it comes down to the leadership team and to your individual boss.”
Fellow Novartis executive Saada McNamee says as leaders and parents, they understand that caring responsibilities can evolve over many years so for workplace policies to be relevant and practical, they need to factor this in.
“My son’s at university and we’re still parenting him, right?” she says.
“That flexible working policy is a really important component in terms of helping our associates consider their obligations at work and their obligations at home.”
McNamee says it’s deeply rewarding to see staff, regardless of gender, taking up the parental leave policy.
“They’re openly having conversations about time with their newborn child, how special that’s been,” she says.
“For me that gives a sense that leaders are doing what they should be doing, which is supporting and encouraging people to put their family at the heart of their lives.”
Developing and nurturing a family-friendly culture for hundreds of employees has taken a dedicated and proactive effort by leaders like Zeller and McNamee.
With everyone, especially those in senior roles, aligned on these core values, it has helped create a solutions-focused environment that enhances productivity, equity and flexibility.
“When you’re putting in place a really inclusive policy in a global multinational, some of the challenges we’ve had is how we navigate that throughout our HR systems and processes,” says McNamee.
“In terms of how we navigate it within the business, I’ve had a few conversations with leaders trying to work through how they’re going to backfill and resource and manage what is a very flexible policy.
“Someone can take that full 16 weeks in one hit.
“And we just practically sit down, break it down and make it work – I haven’t had one leader come to me and say ‘hey, look, this isn’t working’.
“Everyone will come and say ‘okay, we just now need to work out how we’re going to resource for this’.
“Leadership plays a key role.
“Us setting the example is really important.
“I had a bit of a family crisis a couple of weeks ago and my family’s in New Zealand so my husband’s there, my daughter’s in her last year of school and my son’s at university.
“I rang [Zeller] and said ‘hey, look, I’m going to have to get back to New Zealand’. He said ‘just go’. So I worked through that week but I was working from New Zealand. No eyelids battered. It’s just not a big deal.
“Because that’s the way that we operate as a culture.
“So one is having the guidelines in place, but the other is when we build a culture around it and we’re openly talking about it, then it becomes very hard for leaders to go against that or individual managers to go against that.”
We spoke with Matt Zeller and Saada McNamee as part of our partnership with Family Friendly Workplaces.
