Supporting Businesses and Workplaces
We’re here to help you strengthen the way your organisation understands and responds to family violence, for both your employees and customers.
What's our approach?
We work with you to create long-term, meaningful change on projects both big and small.
We do this by engaging in a tailored approach to suit your unique needs, focused on strengthening responses across your business: for customers experiencing family violence, for the employees who support them, and for employees who may be experiencing family violence themselves.
We consult with business and industry leaders, survivor advocates and subject matter experts to ensure responses to family violence informed by better practice and lived expertise.
What do we offer?
Family Violence is a Workplace Issue eLearn
This 30-minute self-paced learning module, hosted on your LMS, allows your staff to learn at their own pace. It provides a foundational understanding of family violence as a workplace issue, the impacts of family violence on employees and workplaces, the importance of family violence procedures in a workplace, how to respond to disclosures, and resources to access specialist family violence services. This eLearn module can be further tailored to suit your workplace’s wider policies and procedures, which will provide your staff with an understanding of your workplace-specific supports.
Responding to disclosures training
This 3-hour in-person or online training session, developed and delivered in accordance with best practice family violence response principles, provides support to people in all roles across your organisation. It provides foundational knowledge to understand the definition, dynamics and impacts of family violence. It guides participants to recognise indicators of family violence, ask questions respectfully, safely provide a basic response to a person disclosing family violence, understand the principles of developing a simple safety plan and making effective referrals.
We offer two streams:
- responding to disclosures from colleagues
- responding to disclosures from customers
Training can be tailored for specific groups (such as people leaders, HR or P&C teams or customer care teams) or delivered to all staff.
Your workplace family violence policies are integrated into the training, so that our advice is aligned to your policies. Where Safe and Equal recommend any best practice improvements to these ways of working, these suggestions may also be incorporated into the training, or fed back to you.
Leadership workshop
We will work with you to develop and deliver a customised workshop to key audiences in your workplace, to create a shared foundational understanding of family violence. This workshop will support participants to understand risks, roles and responsibilities in supporting customers, the employees supporting customers, and employees who may be experiencing family violence themselves. This workshop helps to build buy-in and commitment for your organisation to invest in better understanding the needs of customers and employees experiencing family and domestic violence and ways to support them. It will also help identify roadblocks and agree on solutions.
Best practice end-to-end process review
We provide consultancy services to workplaces looking to develop, update and improve their family violence policy and processes. Across diagnostics, policy and training, we can support you with our specialist family violence knowledge across all levels of your organisation to ensure better practice implementation and solutions tailored to your workplace’s needs. We are also uniquely placed to support trauma informed engagement with survivor advocates, and work with them in alignment with the Family Violence Experts by Experience Framework. A typical review will include:
- An assessment of your customer related and customer facing processes, procedures and communications against industry better and best practice, and an employee capability review
- A review of your employee family violence policy
- Consultations with employees, survivor advocates and an industry advisory group to test findings of the review
- A written report or presentation with our findings and recommendations, and a proposed training plan
We are happy to discuss elements of this end-to-end review that may suit the needs of your organisation at this time.
Lived experience consultancy
Safe and Equal is uniquely placed to support better practice engagement with lived experience. Our team is a growing and diverse pool of survivor advocates who use their lived expertise to inform and re-imagine family violence policy, practice, prevention, community awareness and advocacy. We work with survivor advocates in alignment with the Family Violence Experts by Experience Framework. Types of engagements include:
- Desktop review of policies and procedures, and provision of feedback
- Formal representation in meetings, panels or boards
- Participation in focus groups, interviews or product reviews
- Speaking engagements
Safe and Equal works to engage a minimum of three survivor advocates across all project briefs, to ensure diversity of expertise.
For more information on Safe and Equal’s lived experience program, visit this page.
Guest speaking
We offer workplace and event presentations that explore why family violence is a workplace issue. Our team of experienced presenters can deliver sessions in person or online, tailored to suit your event or workplace needs. We’re flexible with presentation length and happy to collaborate with you to ensure the content is relevant, impactful, and appropriate for your audience.
Ad hoc and ongoing consultation
We also consult on ad-hoc projects based on an hourly rate, utilising best practice and lived expertise to help problem solve any challenges in the implementation of better practice improvements.
Are we the right fit for you?
We work with all businesses, big and small.
With 2 in 5 women having experienced violence since the age of 15, chances are your staff and customers have been – or will be – affected by family violence in some way.
If your business is ready to be part of the solution, we want to work with you.
Why work with Safe and Equal?
As leaders in our sector, our expertise connects better practice approaches with your business. We can help translate what we know to ensure your whole of business response to family violence is aligned with what we do best.
We’ve worked with leaders across private and government sectors, bringing our specialist expertise to help make lasting change across Australia.
Our work translates the latest evidence and embeds lived experience to best support your unique business needs.
Why is this work important for my organisation?
Businesses and workplaces are increasingly being recognised as sites of either support or further harm.
Family violence is everyone’s business. It is a prevalent and complex social issue that has devastating and long-lasting impacts on people across all parts of our community.
But it is preventable.
Ending family violence requires a whole-of-community response – including businesses.
Your employees
Around one in six female workers have experienced violence, or are currently experiencing violence.
Your customers
One in four women have experienced violence, emotional abuse, or economic abuse by a cohabitating partner since the age of 15.
We all have a role to play – be a part of the solution.
Businesses we've
worked with
Get in touch
To learn more about how Safe and Equal can work with your organisation, please reach out to the Workplace Partnerships team at workplacepartnerships@safeandequal.org.au.
RELATED
PAGES