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People - the potential of together.
Environment
Committed to conducting our business in an environmentally sustainable manner.
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Our people are at the core of our mission, to help our customers accelerate the development of drugs and devices that save lives and improve the quality of life, and the driving force behind our success. Our people are a key part of our strategy and one of our four strategic pillars is ‘Talent, Leadership Development and Culture’. We encourage our people to seize the opportunity to bring flexibility, innovation and determination to every situation. By doing this, our people can build exciting and rewarding careers, and deliver results to help bring life-changing medicines to market and maintain ICON’s success as an industry leader. We call it… the potential of together.
Diversity & inclusion
Just as we appreciate the diversity of scientific approaches in clinical trials, we believe diversity of thought coming together in an inclusive workplace leads to innovative ideas, more fruitful collaboration and a vibrant culture. As a values-driven organisation, dignity and respect is at the core of how we work and interact with each other, with customers, patients and suppliers. We value differences of gender, ethnicity, culture and experience and we believe disability should not be a barrier to building a successful career in ICON.
ICON is committed to developing a diverse and inclusive group of future leaders and a strong culture of inclusivity. During 2019, we established the ICON Diversity & Inclusion Steering Group which is comprised of six members of the ICON Executive Team.
Our immediate areas of focus around driving inclusion and diversity are:
Training and development
Under our Diversity and Inclusion programme, we train all our people leaders to understand unconscious bias and similarity bias aswell as how to encourage diversity of thought and foster inclusion in their teams.
Talent
We recognise that more diversity in senior leadership increases organisational performance. In 2019 we launched our global Senior Director Leadership programme, in addition to our Vice President High Potential (HiPo) programme. These programmes will help build and support our development of a diverse and inclusive group of future leaders from within and complements existing senior level programmes already in existence in the organisation.
Recruitment and progression
We continue to strive to source the best talent in our industry from across the world to fill the highly specialised roles required to help bring new drugs to market. Our most senior roles are truly global in nature. Since 2018, we have mandated gender balanced short lists for senior leadership appointments across the organisation in all markets in which we are located.
Training and development
Our success depends on the knowledge, capabilities and quality of our people. That is why we are committed to developing a continuous learning culture – one where we challenge employees with engaging work, where every experience adds to their professional development and where employees can realise their full potential. Elements of our continuous learning and professional development include:
- Comprehensive development programs supporting people leaders at all levels
- Clear and transparent professional development and career pathways
- Succession planning with tailored programmes to develop high-potential employees into future leaders
- Self-directed continuous learning and on the job support
- Development opportunities via secondments to new roles or on new projects
*Data as of 31 December 2019
Community engagement
We recognise the importance of making a positive impact on the communities in which we work and live. We are involved in a number of company-led community engagement programmes and we also support our employees who give up thousands of hours of their time each year to fundraise for important causes and give back to their communities. Our community engagement is particularly focused on two core areas:
- Improving the welfare of people in the communities in which we work and live.
- Supporting education & building closer ties between industry and academia.
Improving the welfare of people in the communities in which we live
ICON employees across the world are making a positive difference to their communities every day. We support causes that are important to our employees and have a number of programmes that support the welfare of people in our local communities. These include:
- Corporate donations to employee-nominated charities. In 2019, we continued our corporate charity donation program to employee nominated charities, by providing substantial donations to 10 charities across the world. Through this programme, we have supported people living in poverty, who are suffering from a variety of diseases, are the victims of domestic violence, or natural disasters. Over the last five years, ICON has supported over 60 charities across the world.
- Donations in support of employee fundraising. ICON employees raise significant amounts for a variety of charities each year through fundraising events. ICON recognizes the enormous effort and creativity of our employees who fundraise for causes that are important to them by supplementing monies raised through ICON’s Charitable Donation Programme, which was launched in 2019. Through the programme, employees can apply for company funds to match the monies they have raised themselves, either through individual or team-based fundraising activities. Through ICON’s Charitable Donation Programme, we have supported a variety of eligible charity/not-for-profit organisations right across the world.
Supporting education and building closer ties between industry and academia
ICON is a strong supporter of strengthening ties between industry and academia, and inspiring the next generation of business and scientific leaders.
- ICON has been honoured as a Benefactor through the Centuries by Trinity College, the university’s highest honour bestowed on its top group of supporters throughout Trinity’s history. ICON received this honour in recognition of its support for Trinity, which includes:
- The ICON–McKeon Research Fellow in Motor Neurone Disease, in honour of Mr. Declan McKeon - a former ICON Board member, will carry out research in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence to derive insights from multimodal clinical, imaging neuro-electric signaling, in the context of the neurodegenerative disease of ALS.
- Partnership with the Trinity Centre for People with Intellectual Disabilities, which provides educational and employment opportunities for those living with intellectual disabilities.
- ICON is a Science Gallery Founding Partner and a lead corporate supporter of the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin since its inception in 2008. Science Gallery aims to inspire and transform curious minds through engagement with science. ICON launched a new healthcare series with Science Gallery in 2019, which aims to explore healthcare, the human experience and the future of disease treatment.
- ICON has been a strategic partner of University College Dublin (UCD) since 2012, which has been heralded as a model for industry-academia collaboration.
- ICON supports our people who volunteer their time to deliver Junior Achievement educational programmes in financial literacy, work readiness, STEM and entrepreneurship to students from junior school through to secondary school. We began our partnership with Junior Achievement in Ireland in 2019 and we intend on expanding the programme to other countries within the Junior Achievement global network in the coming years.
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ICON has a partnership with the Women’s Gaelic Players Association, whereby we provide ICON- GPA Life Sciences Scholarships to inter-county football and camogie players engaged in undergraduate and post-graduate life sciences courses. ICON also provides mentoring to players to help them on their career journeys.