Take a simple survey to help avoid the costly risk of losing your staff

WorkL’s survey can help you discover the six key areas that could help avoid the risk of staff turnover.

What is the key to improving employee turnover rates?

Pay is overrated, says Lord Mark Price, founder of WorkL, an organisation dedicated to increasing the overall workplace happiness and engagement.

“I was very lucky,” says Lord Price, “that when I left university, I joined the John Lewis Partnership as a graduate trainee. And on day one, I was told that the supreme purpose of the organisation was the happiness of the people that work there, which may seem a bit odd today. But the founder of the company over 100 years ago had this really simple idea that if people were happy at work, they would work harder, they would stay longer, there would be less sick absence and customers would get much better service.”

He mulled over it for 30 years, went to business schools and pored over research that showed there was a direct correlation between workplace happiness and higher productivity and profit flow for a business. He found that many organisations continued to use fear to get more work done, instead of happiness and engagement, but it wasn’t a lasting strategy for producing good results. High turnover and the accompanying cost – which went into a vicious cycle – might be the result of depending on fear to “motivate” staff. Happy and engaged workforces are more successful.

The possibility of staff turnover, measured as flight risk in quantitative terms, is one of the most powerful results of the WorkL survey of 35 questions, which was developed across six key dimensions – Reward and Recognition; Information Sharing; Empowerment; Pride; Job Satisfaction; and Wellbeing – each consisting of three to five elements.

“A lot of companies now have high levels of staff turnover,” says Lord Price. “That they have been bringing more people in focuses on that. Their focus should be, what’s this really costing us? What’s the bottom line cost of hiring all these people and then losing them really quickly? That’s what we help them understand – what they are losing, but what they could gain if they had a happier and a more engaged workforce.”

He says lost productivity when new employees settle in is another huge cost factor.

“So for every individual, every level, within every industry, we know the cost of losing something. And then what we’re able to do is look at a company’s performance against the industry average and say, this is how much more it’s costing you than the industry average, to recruit and retain because your workforce are leaving, because they’re not happy. So we tie it all back to what’s the commercial value to the organisation.”

Rich data is an important part of WorkL analytics, provided to participating companies through a dynamic dashboard. “At the moment, we’ve got about 5000 to 6000 Australian organisations that we’ve got data on. So we can compare them against their industry, we can compare them against global. And then what we do is we specifically say to them, this is the area where you’re scoring beneath the industry, and here are things you can do about it. We give them lots of practical advice to say, here are what other people are doing in this space to improve their performance. And the reason that’s important is that there is a very clear link between happiness and commercial success.”

While looking through the dashboard of results and analytics provided by WorkL, every segment of the workforce will possibly feel heartened.

“This is my demographic, where people like me feel happiest working,” Lord Price says.

“What I want to try to do is to help workers all over the world find the places where they’re going to be happy working. Anybody can go take the survey. We do it for organisations and individuals. We help every member of the workforce taking the survey understand if they’re not happy, why they’re not happy, and what they can do to get more from their work. So our goal is simply to try to make people all over the world happier in the workplace.”

Explaining the methodology, Lord Price says companies have to qualify to make it to the list of best workplaces.

“So the qualification will be based on four different things,” he says. “First of all, your response rate – you’ve got to get a certain percentage of your workforce to enter. Second thing will be on the score that you get in the questionnaire. The third thing will be an audit. So after you’ve completed the survey, we’ll send you an audit. The fourth is a journalistic review by The Australian, which will look at the audit.”

Through the survey, Lord Price would like to connect people with jobs that they will be happiest doing. Both organisations and people get a dashboard of data on themselves that they can use in their working lives. For companies, it works out cheap because if they went directly to a workplace engagement platform to get the kind of rich data provided by WorkL, it will cost a lot more.

“It would probably cost five to 10 times more than taking the survey through The Australian and get the data,” Lord Price says. “So it’s really exceptional value for them to take the survey. And they’re also getting the chance to enter these awards. So it’s a no-brainer, as they say.”

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