Find out if your workplace is the happiest in Australia

The Australian has partnered with employee experience platform WorkL to discover the happiest and most engaged workplaces across Australia.

Are you in Australia’s happiest workplace? Picture: iStock

PADMA IYER

5 min read

2:42PMJune 12, 2023.

Updated 3:30PMJune 19, 2023

The Australian Business Network

Money can’t buy happiness. Pay is no longer the key determinant of a happy and engaged workforce.

After the pandemic, we have a different concept of the workplace – how we engage with it and what we expect from it. Does the organisation care about my wellbeing, am I empowered to do my own work, is there career development, am I given enough information about my role and my work, do they make me feel proud to be a part of the team – these are front-of-mind questions for the staff. They are asking themselves, am I happy in this workplace?

Employers are worried about rising salaries, talent shortages and flight risk – the danger that staff may leave because they are not happy. So happiness has become the most important indicator of the best workplaces.

Take The Australian-WorkL survey to get your workplace happiness score, click on the link below.

The Australian has partnered with employee experience platform WorkL, to discover the best places to work in Australia – workplaces where the staff are most engaged and happiest. Workplace engagement and happiness matters, because it is highly correlated with business success.

Take The Australian-WorkL survey to get your workplace happiness score

More than 300,000 people have taken the WorkL survey to get insights about how happy they are in their jobs.

Launched in 2017, WorkL now helps more than 300 businesses worldwide to improve the happiness and engagement of their staff. It provides each of the businesses participating in the survey with a dashboard of granular data about their industry and how they measure up against it in quantified terms of flight risk of their employees. WorkL also provides rich data from the survey results about key demographics such as gender, sexual orientation and age.

The 35-question survey focuses on WorkL’s six steps to workplace happiness. To achieve a high engagement score, a company must score consistently well across all the six drivers of employee engagement and happiness – Reward and Recognition; Information Sharing; Empowerment; Pride; Job Satisfaction; and Wellbeing. Each of the six steps consists of three to five key elements, measured on a 0-10 scale.

It takes less than 10 minutes for businesses to set up the survey and enter The Australian Best Workplaces 2024 awards. It takes about five minutes for employees to answer the questions. The fee for entering the awards starts at just $1400 for organisations with 10 to 49 employees. Higher fees apply for larger organisations.

Entries are now open for The Australian Best Workplaces 2024 awards and close December 14. The winners will be celebrated in a special report in early 2024.

There are 12 main categories of awards. An organisation can be a winner in more than one category.

TO ENTER, CLICK HERE

The survey focuses on the six major drivers of workplace engagement and happiness.

The 6 drivers

1. Reward and recognition

WorkL research shows pay is normally ranked between fifth and ninth among the most important considerations by employees. What drives much higher levels of happiness and engagement is being recognised when you have done something well. Bosses are generally pretty bad at it, says WorkL founder Mark Price. They give good news or positive feedback about once every two months, but critical “constructive” feedback twice a week.

2. Information sharing

Empowered and happy staff are knowledgeable about their jobs, their organisation and what’s happening. A huge determinant of how happy you are at work is the relationship you have with your line manager. It can set the tone for a happy and engaged workforce.

3. Empowerment

Empowerment gives people the tools – and the freedom – they need to do their jobs. The more you can trust and respect people to do their job, the more they will give you back. Empowerment is about acknowledgment and recognition for their abilities. It’s the difference between having a boss who stands over your shoulder and says I wouldn’t do it that way, and a boss who gives you an objective and says it’s up to you to achieve it. It’s when the boss says I am fairly happy to support you but I want to see what you can do. Empowered people go on to innovate.

4. Wellbeing

The pandemic made a big difference to how we think about wellbeing. Surveys show that staff felt looked after during the pandemic. When you feel that you are being cared for and looked after, you feel secure and give so much more.

5. Instilling pride

Pride in the work that you do arises out of the assurance that your role is important and you contribute to the overall objectives of the organisation. Great organisations instil pride in the workforce.

6. Job satisfaction

Various factors add up to job satisfaction. An important one is career development. This happens when people feel they are being developed as an individual, and that they are learning more every day. Younger staff, when they join the workforce, get a lot of development, but it could begin to drop off as they get older. Another factor contributing to satisfaction is doing a job that you really want to do. The reality is that many are doing a job they don’t like but are going through the motions. This is a challenge for employers. Another important factor of job satisfaction is the relationship with the line manager – this is critical to whether staff are happy in their jobs.

HOW IT WORKS: METHODOLOGY

The Australian Best Places to Work 2024 lists the top employers in Australia. The survey uses 35 questions from WorkL’s employee engagement survey, developed by behavioural scientists, data analysts, psychologists, business leaders, academics and independent parties to most accurately monitor employee engagement and wellbeing in the workplace.

To achieve a high overall engagement score, a company must consistently perform well across its six-step framework, encompassing reward and recognition, instilling pride, information sharing, empowerment, wellbeing and job satisfaction.

It is not possible to trade off one dimension against another – in a highly engaged workplace all six steps will be seen positively by employees, albeit to varying degrees. An organisation’s overall engagement score is the sum of all question responses, divided by the maximum possible value as a percentage.

To be successfully accredited as an Australian Best Workplace, organisations must achieve a minimum overall engagement score. Our banding threshold is based on both independent and WorkL-commissioned research on employee engagement initiatives and is reinforced by WorkL’s benchmarking data of more than 36,000 organisations. For an accurate representation of employee sentiment, organisations were required to send the survey to as many current employees as possible. Those participating had to reach these minimum average response rates to qualify:

● Small (10-49): 60 per cent or 20 people;

● Medium (50-249): 50 per cent or 100 people;

● Big (250-1999): 50 per cent or 800 people;

● Very Big (2000 +): 40 per cent or 1300.