Be counted as one of the best places to work
For an organisation to outperform its peers, it needs to discover how happy and engaged its employees are. Enter The Australian Best Places to Work 2025 to find out. Entries are now open.
A simple book on employee happiness and engagement, Mark Price’s Happy Economics is an effective guide to greater profitability. It is aimed at workplaces struggling to improve their bottom line while retaining their talent.
A general management notion is that pursuing one of the two goals gets in the way of the other, and that a certain amount of pain and suffering on the part of employees needs to be taken for granted while the workplace leaps forward in economic terms. Old-fashioned wisdom states that if profits and growth are the main goals, your employees are likely to be working unhappily while simultaneously facing an uncertain future as more and more work is outsourced in order to reduce costs, and, if the main goal is to keep employees happy, workplaces may have to be indulgent and allow their growth ambitions to slow down.
Price’s book clears these misconceptions. Employee happiness is quite compatible with a growing workplace intent on achieving more profitability. Happiness at the workplace leads to greater engagement, as employees voluntarily use their discretionary time and effort in being innovative and productive. A happy workplace creates more revenue and more profit, and if workplaces keep employee happiness as the primary goal, the collective economic gains will ultimately add to the national wealth. This is the underlying philosophy behind Happy Economics.
Good in theory, but how does it work in practice, you might ask.
It works very well, is the answer.
Mark Price is the founder of employee engagement platform WorkL, which provides the methodology behind The Australian Best Places to Work, a quest that started this year and is now entering the second year. The WorkL methodology measures employee happiness (yes, happiness can and should be quantified) and engagement across six categories: reward and recognition; information sharing; empowerment; wellbeing; job satisfaction; and, instilling pride. These categories are explained in more detail in Price’s book.
“When people feel happy, engaged and committed, they perform better,” Price says in his book.
“If people are happier at work, they give more extra discretionary effort, work harder and for longer hours. When people have a sense of ownership and belonging and they are happy, they work harder and are more committed. They’ll take less time off sick, too, and be less likely to leave an organisation.”
The Australian Best Places to Work 2024 featured more than 50 workplaces. These workplaces excel in creating the magic of employee happiness.
■ The full list of The Australian Best Places to Work 2024 is here.
Marble, a leading national recruitment group included in the list, says, “We create a culture where people feel supported, no matter the challenges they face. This sense of security builds trust and promotes wellbeing.
“Every team member is seen as a stakeholder in our collective journey. Their voices shape the direction of the business, creating shared ownership and engagement.”
Employees are lifelong learners, Marble says, and “success stories aren’t just about the bottom line, but about how we leave others feeling”.
For InvestorKit, also featured in the Australian Best Places to Work 2024, the pathway to employee happiness and engagement is through the strategy it refers to as PPF goals setting.
“This stands for Personal - Professional - Financial goal setting,” InvestorKit says. “We look at this across the short term (0-1 year), medium term (1-3 years) and longer term (3-5+ years), reviewed annually.”
InvestorKit supports its employees through pathways within the organisation.
Aurora Marketing takes employee engagement quite seriously as it believes that it is a process that evolves continually, requiring committed people.
“Aurora employs new members of the team with the intention of developing a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship and all our processes facilitate this,” it says. “Performance coaching, mentoring, training and opportunities for career progression are part of the engagement process. As are activities that encourage teamwork, sharing and trust. The work we do is challenging and our support programs identify those challenges, mitigate them where possible, and reward employees accordingly.”
Mark Price and his book confirm the strategies employed by the Best Places to Work.
“Happier employees outperform their competitors,” Price says.
Each of the six components in Price’s methodology plays an important role in the overall measurement of workplace happiness.
Of the six components, reward and recognition, as every employer and employee intuitively understands, must be an essential ingredient of workplace happiness. “Pay is important, but recognition can be a far more powerful motivator,” Price’s book says.
Information sharing may be the hardest to achieve because people may not always listen, Price says. The best way around it is a quick catch-up everyday. “In other words, a five-minute daily catch-up, a half-hour meeting each week and a longer all-hands briefing either monthly or quarterly,” he says.
Empowerment of employees, another component of overall happiness, too can prove to be challenging as managers tend to believe they “have been promoted to have all the good ideas”. It is the job of the manager, says Price, to get more from their team members than their competitors might get from their teams. “Viewed in this context there should be an active conversation between manager and the managed on how can we do better, where are the improvements to be made,” he says.
Another component of employee happiness, ensuring wellbeing, is easier said than done. It involves following all the other components well. Providing sufficient resources and avoiding micromanaging, unrealistic expectations and unrealistic timeframes are vital to achieve wellbeing.
Happy Economics emphasises that pride in one’s work and workplace is a powerful motivator. “The first thing to do is to explain to each employee why what they do is instrumental to the organisation’s success,” Price explains.
Job satisfaction is another key component. “The biggest drivers of job satisfaction are the relationship you have with your line manager and feeling that you are being developed,” Price says. “One thing that is often overlooked is the continued training and development of mature staff.”
Workplaces aiming to find out how they can improve their productivity and overall competitiveness in the marketplace will do well to find out how they are faring in the happiness stakes.
Entries are now open for The Australian Best Places to Work 2025. It’s easy to send an entry to The Australian Best Places to Work 2025: scan the QR code on this page or go to https://workl.com/business/workplace-awards/the-australian-au/
Entry fee varies depending on the size of the organisation. Entries close 31 March 2025.