Pfizer works hard to ensure that its employees and the community at large view the company as a premiere employer. In practice that translates to expressly-stated policies about staff's work/life balance and the flexibility of office hours.

"In modern management you manage people through objectives and through deliverables, you don't manage them by how many hours they sit in front of you," Catopodis says.

"At Pfizer Australia we take a strong approach to vision definition, which leads to mission, which leads to objectives, which leads to accountability."

It's all about flexibility and giving workers choices, says Catopodis. "You can't force people to work in their lunch hour or at home," he says. "But from an ROI perspective, we've quizzed them a lot internally, and conservatively speaking we're saving our field representatives one hour per day per person. That's 400 people in total. By using this technology, we're saving at least 400 hours a day across two field forces."

Despite these gains, Catopodis says security remains a constant battle. "Our biggest challenge is balancing access to new technology while at the same time managing security and compliance," he says. "You can't just roll out anything you feel like."