Improve employee experience and business performance

Understanding your market, competitors, customers, and employees is the key to success in business, says Lord Mark Price, Founder of WorkL.

Lord Mark Price, founder of WorkL.

“Knowledge is power” is a commonly used quote and certainly true when it comes to business.

It applies to understanding your market, competitors, customers and also employees. The latter of these, your employees, is often overlooked, but I would submit is the most important data you can collect.

Why? Because repeated academic evidence, supported by WorkL’s own research and Extra Discretionary Effort Calculator ™, demonstrates organisations with happy and highly engaged employees typically experience 20 per cent higher productivity, 43 per cent less waste, reduced staff turnover and sick absence, and, crucially, 20 per cent higher profits plus, as a recent American report showed, 134 per cent higher earnings per share.

In short, having happy and therefore engaged workers is good for them, your organisation and the wider economy.

That’s why after more than 30 years working for the John Lewis Partnership, leading Waitrose and as deputy chairman, I founded WorkL – an employee experience platform to help organisations measure, track and improve engagement, retention and commercial performance and to recruit the best-fit candidates.

At a time when employee retention and recruitment has never been more important, I’m delighted that WorkL will be powering The Australian Best Places to Work Awards 2024, recognising the very best Australian businesses when it comes to employee experience.

By entering The Australian Best Places to Work awards, organisations will receive data and predictive analysis within 24 hours of their survey closing about how their employees feel and opportunity areas to improve engagement.

In addition to the data, organisations have the chance to be recognised by The Australian as a great place to work so as to attract, recruit and retain top talent.

WorkL research shows the current flight risk in Australia – the percentage of employees likely to leave within the next nine months – stands at 43 per cent.

Knowing your organisation’s flight risk and the reasons behind it will help you put a plan into action to reduce this.

The survey, which entrants will send to their employees via a personalised link, features 35 straightforward questions, is quick to complete and accurately measures employee engagement and wellbeing in the workplace across six areas: reward and recognition, instilling pride, information sharing, empowerment, wellbeing and job satisfaction.

The awards will recognise organisations with the highest levels of employee engagement, wellbeing and satisfaction across the following categories:

● Best small place to work

● Best medium place to work

● Best big place to work

● Best very big place to work

● Best places to work for women

● Best places to work for ethnic minority employees

● Best places to work for disabled employees

● Best places to work for age ranges 16-34 and 55+

● Best places to work for
LGBTQ+ employees

● Best places to work for employee wellbeing

Our WorkL crowdsourced data, collected from more than 500,000 employees at 40,000 organisations globally in the past year, shows the overall employee engagement score in Australia is 73 per cent, with the highest scoring industry being entertainment and media at 76 per cent and the lowest scoring being defence with 66 per cent.

White and Arabic ethnic groups score lower for engagement in Australia compared to other ethnicities and Australian heterosexual employees have significantly higher engagement scores than the LGBTQ+ community.

The wellbeing risk of Australian employees is at 40 per cent compared to 39 per cent for British workers.

Australian employees score highest on questions around feeling empowered at work.

In entering these awards, you’ll not only be recognised as a place where people want to work but better understand your workforce. Knowledge, as they say, is power.

Lord Mark Price is the founder of WorkL

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