Customer Science was fortunate to take a seat at the Great Place to Work Conference in Sydney a few weeks ago.
For those not yet acquainted with Great Place to Work, it is a global workplace research and consulting firm founded in 1981, and headed up in Australia by Managing Director Zrinka Lovrencic. Core to its philosophy is that to create a great workplace it’s necessary to build high quality relationships in the workplace – relationships based on trust.
Zrinka and her team conduct an annual study for participating companies, comprised of a 58-statement employee survey and an evaluation of participating companies’ policies and procedures around nine specific practice areas. Out of this study, Great Place to Work releases a list of the 50 Best Places to Work in Australia for the year. An annual awards event is then held and with talent recruitment, retention and people engagement being such an important, ongoing issue for every organisation, a listing in the top 50 is a prestigious achievement.
At the conference there was a strong sense that the importance of employee engagement is gaining more momentum than ever. Conference participants flew in from around Australia and were typically super enthusiastic about how their participation in the Great Place to Work study had been transformative for their organisations, even they had yet to make the top 50 cut.
The conference provided a unique opportunity to hear from some of the top 50 rated companies and all were incredibly proud and very open in sharing their people engagement challenges and their often creative approaches to resolving them year-on-year.
Organisations that shared insights on-stage in a panel chat were Salesforce (the winner in the over-1000 employee category), Stryker (winner in the 100 – 999 employees category) and Avenue Dental (winner in the under-100 employees category). Presentations were also delivered by representatives of Service NSW, CISCO Systems Australia, U Bank and Richard Crookes Construction.
It was special to attend a conference where such a wide variety of industries was represented and fascinating to hear recurring themes about creating culture rather than buying culture, creating solutions around female empowerment in traditionally male-dominated environments, the addressing of mental health issues in the workplace and the importance of bringing customer stories to employees to engender the sense of meaningful contribution. And there was so much more. You can read about 50 Best Places to Work here.
If you want to discuss ideas to help raise real people engagement in your organisation, lets have a chat.