Category eleven – Best demonstrated leadership in rehabilitation and return to work
Nancy Andrian is the Injury Care and Recovery Manager for Lendlease Queensland. Her core service is to support a total of 810 staff in their wellness journey and return them to their best lifestyle after an injury or illness.
Nancy inspires others by leading from the front, seeking continuous improvement through innovation and challenging the status quo. She demonstrates leadership qualities of honesty, integrity and confidence and adopts an ethics-based philosophy on return to work underpinned by science and knowledge. Her approach is to:
- recognise that the most valuable asset to a business are its employees, and its commitment to assisting them navigate the return-to-work process
- provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with a physical or mental health injury that allows them to perform the essential functions of their jobs or another appropriate job
- establish a return to work program that is interactive, immersive, participatory and collaborative.
Nancy communicates effectively and positively influences all stakeholders involved in the rehabilitation process. She builds rapport through collaboration and is committed to sharing knowledge and experience to genuinely co-create a vision of success with the people who are responsible for making it happen.
She is the driving force behind innovative, creative return to work and wellness solutions by developing and implementing a new online application called LEWI – Lendlease Employee Wellness Information. The app is a digital wellbeing toolkit that supports staff to take the appropriate steps to ensure the physical and psychological safety of people.
Nancy has been described by her peers as a highly skilled, intuitive, nurturing leader who goes above and beyond for the staff at Lendlease.
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Nancy Andrian, Injury Care and Recovery Manager
Hi, I'm Nancy. I'm the Injury Care and Recovery Manager for Lendlease. I've been with Lendlease for 11 years and have been in this role for the past six years. Our role involves facilitating a journey for our injured workers and returning them back to optimal health and lifestyle and ultimately, back to work. One of the things I saw was a huge disconnect between site personnel and the corporate personnel, I really believe the minute someone believes that people are caring for them, and they're legitimately wanting to support them, that drives that motivation for them to want to get better. And I think that made a huge difference, changing the mindset of the managers to care for their employees, rather than just leave it up to me and have them participate in the return to work, participate and collaborate in the development of the suitable duties plans showed that the worker felt part of the team, the worker felt needed and wanted and I guess felt the love in developing a return to work journey.
Kathryn Agius, Brisbane Motorway Services
Nancy provides an enormous amount of support to our business, to myself, as well as to our staff in getting them back to work as quickly as possible. Part of our job is 24/7 incident response on a major motorway in Brisbane. We have a really positive response to Nancy's philosophy. She's positive with them on the phone. She'll go the extra mile. She works out of hours to provide support to them, and I've only ever had great feedback about her. One of her strengths is that she's able to explain things in layman's terms and make us aware of our responsibilities and the employee aware of their responsibilities as well. So, Nancy developed the app, LEWI, that's available to our staff 24/7. We have a number of staff that suffer from PTSD. So, it's important for them to be able to get support when they need it and it's sometimes that's the middle of the night. It's a mechanism for our staff to be able to check in and monitor themselves and reach out for additional support if that's what's required.
Nancy Andrian, Injury Care and Recovery Manager
I had an idea to develop the app after seeing some pain points on site. In a way my app was to empower people managers to seek supports that would benefit them in managing and looking after their employees. The most rewarding part of my role is when people get back to work and back to health and when they thank me and state, that thank you is genuine, it's an amazing feeling to have a thank you from somebody that's gone through a difficult time. And we know we've removed barriers and supported them through a journey that then has led them to an outcome where they're back to their happy selves and normal selves. That's the most rewarding part.