The focus is now firmly on people, rather than process

The pandemic has shifted the focus to employee happiness and engagement, rather than return on investment or productivity.

The new workplace focus is employee happiness and engagement.

The pandemic turned the workplace as we knew it on its head. People became the focal point of an organisation post-2020, not return on investment or productivity or any of the buzzwords that ­denote more widgets in less time.

“Pre-Covid, people were saying, how do we get more customers? Or how can we reach our service there? Are our shareholders happy?” says Lord Mark Price, founder of employee experience platform WorkL.

“All of a sudden, now it’s all about our people. Have we got enough of them? Are they trained enough? How are we going to manage flexible working? What are we going to do about pay? So all of a sudden, the focus has turned to the employee.

“The other thing is, employees think that management did a very good job through Covid. Because people were working from home, but getting the same pay, people felt there was better pay.

“People work much harder at recognising because they couldn’t see people in the office. So in virtually every aspect of the survey that we test, scores went up.

“The only area where people felt things were less good, were around collaboration. People found it harder to collaborate around creativity.”

Lord Price says organisations on the whole have become more people-centric and this is not going to change, for a while, at least.

“Employees have always been important, obviously,” he says. “But I think that the way people are now thinking about employees is different. There are labour shortages, so it’s becoming much harder to recruit. So recruitment is a bigger focus, because there are such high levels of staff turnover.

“Retention has become more important. There’s a greater focus on pay. There’s a greater focus on flexibility, because people work from home for extended periods of time.”

The debate has shifted to whether employees will return to the office, and the economic fallout of the disruption to the notion of office as we knew it.

“What it’s made us think is how should we work going forward? And central to all of it is the employee: is the employee happy?”

WorkL says there has been a 15 per cent increase in people feeling happier about where they work since the start of the pandemic. The overall happiness at work has improved compared to pre-Covid. The average engagement score in 2019 was 55 per cent compared to 67 per cent last year. The current score for 2023 is 70 per cent.

Thousands of organisations have implemented the hybrid model of work, giving people the flexibility to work two days from home. In the tussle between work from home (WFH) and return to office (RTO), a workable balance has been struck.

The hybrid model holds for now, says Lord Price. And it works well for many segments of the workforce, including women. However, there are some sectors of the workforce that will have to rule out work-from-home arrangements or a hybrid workplace, for example, supermarket staff.

And there are some office situations that those working from home will miss, for example the social community and the collaborative work, especially when creative solutions depend on it.

“And I think that if managers tried to enforce five days back in the office, they will lose people, because there’ll be options for them to do three days in the office, two days at home, or some kind of flexible models. I think it’s very hard to get that genie back in the bottle,” Lord Price says.

WorkL’s data bank of Australian and UK workplaces enables it to compare the two nations and make insightful observations about segments of the workforce:

• Australian women are slightly more engaged compared to those in the UK.

• In both countries, hetero­sexual/straight have significantly higher engagement scores than the LGBTQ+ community.

• Disabled employees in Australia are more engaged compared to those in the UK.

• The overall engagement score in Australia is 70 per cent compared to 68 per cent in the UK.

When looking at the flight risk of Australian employees, it is currently at 43 per cent, on a par with that of the UK. This means that nearly half of employees are at risk of leaving in the next nine months.

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

Information sharing is a dimension where Australian employers are doing well, scoring 70 per cent compared to just 61 per cent in the UK.

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