Join the ranks of the nation’s best places to work
The Australian has partnered with WorkL, a leading employee experience platform, to find the best organisation with consistently high levels of staff engagement. Reach out and win awards.
“Organisations with the highest levels of staff happiness see greater productivity, customer satisfaction and profits” says Lord Mark Price, the founder of WorkL.
The Australian, powered by global employee experience platform WorkL, is on a search for Australia’s Best Places to Work in 2025.
The Australian has partnered with WorkL, a leading employee experience platform that helps companies to measure, track and improve staff engagement. Together with WorkL, we’re on a journey to find and celebrate the very best organisations with consistently high levels of positive employee experience in Australia.
About WorkL
WorkL, founded by Mark Price, former managing director of Waitrose and deputy chair of the John Lewis Partnership, is the leading global employee experience platform.
WorkL’s benchmarking data from more than 100,000 organisations demonstrates that workplaces with happy and highly engaged employees typically experience higher productivity, reduced staff turnover and sick absence, and higher profits. These workplaces also find it easier to retain employees and recruit new staff. This forms the basis of WorkL’s mission to help individuals work happier and enable organisations to boost commercial performance by prioritising employee wellbeing.
With flexible surveys, advanced data insights, and predictive analytics, WorkL empowers businesses to measure, track and enhance workplace satisfaction.
WorkL proudly powers the prestigious Best Places to Work Awards in partnership with leading publications across the globe – The Times (UK & Ireland), The Australian, Khaleej Times, Sunday Times South Africa, and BusinessWorld in The Philippines.
Global initiative
The Best Places to Work Awards are a global initiative to put a spotlight on the companies that take employee engagement and wellbeing seriously.
“At WorkL, we measure whether employees are engaged, have all the information they need and are paid fairly, then we give that information back to companies so that they can improve. These awards – which are now open to enter for 2025 – celebrate companies of all sizes that are doing well,” Lord Price says.
“The companies that enter receive amazing data to help their organisations improve – granular data that will tell you by demographics where things are working well and where they are not. It is inexpensive to enter, but a massive gain in terms of insight and making your employees feel good, promoting your business and boosting the economy. Being a Best Place to Work isn’t about huge investment either. These are simple things about how people are treated, how they feel, whether they feel part of the family or not. This is more about culture, not necessarily capital spending.”
The winners of 2024 Best Places to Work exemplify this.
“We’re incredibly proud of this achievement and grateful to our amazing team for making Splend such a great place to work. Their passion, dedication and positive spirit are what truly make our company special,” Splend says.
“One of the most rewarding insights from our employee engagement survey is our staff’s immense pride in being part of the Building Engineering family” Building Engineering says.
“Huge thanks to the bright and funny team at Aurora Marketing for bringing their best shelves to work every day. Aurora Marketing is determined to keep making that elixir of happiness for a long time to come,” Aurora Marketing says.
“We love what we do, and we provide a culture that inspires our team to thrive, so they love what they do too,” Sherlock Wealth says.
At the heart of the awards is the proven methodology based on six key drivers of workplace engagement:
1. Reward and recognition
2. Information sharing
3. Empowerment
4. Wellbeing
5. Instilling pride
6. Job satisfaction
You can find out more about the methodology in Lord Price’s latest book – Happy Economics. In the book, he explores how to create happy teams and create a corporate happiness plan that can be used by any business.
The awards are based on real employee feedback, so the recognition you receive is a true reflection of the positive culture you’ve built.
Awards categories:
● Best Places to Work: Small Organisation (10-49 Employees)
● Best Places to Work: Medium Organisation (50-249 Employees)
● Best Places to Work: Big Organisation (250-1,999 Employees)
● Best Places to Work: Very Big Organisation (2,000+ Employees)
Spotlight Categories
● Best Places to Work for Women
● Best Places to Work for Disabled Employees
● Best Places to Work for Ethnic Minority Employees
● Best Places to Work for LGBTQA+ Employees
● Best Places to Work for 16-34 year olds
● Best Places to Work for 55+ year olds
● Best Places to Work for Employee Wellbeing
How we identify the best
To identify the best workplaces, WorkL’s employee engagement survey – developed by behavioural scientists, data analysts, and psychologists – focuses on the above-mentioned six key drivers that are essential to workplace engagement.
The six areas form a comprehensive framework to measure how employees feel about their workplace, a highly engaged workplace will perform well across all these dimensions.
How the survey works
The survey includes 31 questions that measure employee engagement on a 0-10 scale.
Each company’s overall engagement score is calculated by combining responses and presenting them as a percentage.
To qualify for the awards, organisations must achieve a minimum 70 per cent overall engagement score.
By participating in the awards, organisations of all sizes and industries will gain detailed insights into employee sentiment through an interactive dashboard. This includes industry benchmark analytics, employee attrition risk, and net promoter scores.
WorkL’s data analysts can also segment survey results by demographics such as gender, disability, sexual orientation, and age, providing a comprehensive view of workplace experiences.
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’s 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.
WorkL’s 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 100,000 organisations.
For an accurate representation of employee sentiment, organisations are required to send the survey to as many current employees as possible. The survey takes five minutes to complete and the platform is fully mobile optimised.
Organisations are required to complete a supplementary information survey, which is analysed in conjunction with their survey score to help support their entry.
Those participating have to also reach minimum average response rates to qualify across their organisation:
● Very Big – 25 per cent.
● Big – 35 per cent.
● Medium – 45 per cent.
● Small – 50 per cent.
Entries are now open and Best Places to Work organisations will be celebrated in a dedicated supplement in August. How would yours fare? Be in the running to find out.
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To enter The Australian Best Places to Work 2025 awards, use the QR code on this page or go to: https://workl.com/business/workplace-awards/the-australian-au/
or email theaustralianbestplacestowork@workl.com.au.
Surveys must be completed by May 31, 2025.
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