We’re thrilled to have brilliant partners supporting Unleash Your Inner Rebel! Here, Dawn Smedley, Head of Culture, shares how WorkBuzz is helping build great company cultures in the UK and around the world.
What does WorkBuzz do?
We describe ourselves as HR’s secret weapon. Our platform is all about helping organisations listen to their ‘everyday heroes’ – their employees – and gather real-time feedback to help them improve employee experience and build their culture.
Who are your clients and what kinds of sectors do they operate in?
Our clients are wide-ranging and from across all sectors, and include the likes of Priory – who are presenting at the event – HS2, Five Guys, Prezzo, Hovis and Whistl.
We’re especially good at helping those in leisure and hospitality, retail, manufacturing, construction and engineering, and transport and logistics. Our clients are based around the world and typically have between 500 to 5,000 employees. Often, they will come to us because they need to measure employee engagement. We’ll use data from initial surveys and then produce a listening programme that gives them the data and feedback to help them improve their employee experience.
What exactly is a listening programme?
It’s about giving people the opportunity to share their thoughts and feedback in an unfiltered way. This could be different for different organisations. You can do it by having meetings and listening as leaders, but what we find is that this becomes harder at scale and quite often people like to have some confidentiality before they give their full, unfiltered feedback. And that’s what WorkBuzz can provide – giving people the opportunity to share their thoughts confidentially and organisations the ability to then use the employee voice to make things better.
What are you currently supporting your clients with?
One of the biggest challenges almost all of our clients are facing is ‘The Great Resignation’. A lot of our clients are engaging with us to understand how and if they can stop employees from leaving. They want to know how to leverage their employer brand to attract talent in a competitive market that currently favours the candidate. We’re also supporting our clients by helping them understand what they need to adapt in their organisation to engage with employees from younger generations.
Ultimately, it’s about understanding each client and their individual needs and objectives,
which gives us the ability to understand their challenges to create the right listening programme.
What’s your advice on how to develop inclusive cultures?
We partnered with A Leader Like Me to create an eBook, which centres on a continuous improvement model of Learn-Plan-Act-Realise to help you review where you are to start, continue, or reset(!) your plans and progress your own unique journey to build an inclusive culture.
You can’t decide what that positive culture looks like by yourself as a leader of an organisation, or as a central HR function. You have to canvas opinions, understand what your current employees’ needs are, what your future employees’ needs are, and have that in mind as an end goal or vision. But to get to that vision you need to be real about where you are right now and complete a diagnostic to understand this in detail.
Younger generations have high expectations about what we should be contributing to society. They’re looking for consciously ethical and responsible organisations that align to their values and, unless you’ve got the right setup and you’re talking about it in the right way as an organisation, you’re not going to engage them. It’s about aligning with employees to make sure they feel they’re having a positive impact on the world in the place where they give most of their time at work.
There’s no one size fits all. It’s about listening to people, using their ideas and being honest about the gaps. Download our guide for practical steps on how to build inclusive cultures.
Let’s get to Unleash Your Inner Rebel – thank you for partnering with us once again! What made you become a sponsor?
We’re big supporters of Advita – she’s a powerhouse, pushing boundaries in the right way. This event is all about challenging the status quo, continuing to push the boundaries, and changing the world of work – which completely aligns with our vision at WorkBuzz. For us, it was just a bit of a no-brainer to get involved!
What does ‘Unleashing Your Inner Rebel’ mean to you?
Unleashing Your Inner Rebel means not conforming or acting in the way others believe you should to fit into certain boxes. It means being truly authentic and unafraid to be completely yourself.
I’m passionate about making workplaces more inclusive because that’s how you’re going to tap into the strengths of other people. At WorkBuzz, we’re anti the archaic top-down, tell-do approach – it doesn’t work in business anymore. The best organisations listen to their people, try out new ideas where they take a bit more (calculated) risk and measure impact. So that’s what we’re here to help people do and that’s why Unleash Your Inner Rebel fits so perfectly with what we’re doing.
Visit WorkBuzz’s website for some brilliant resources to help with employee engagement and building inclusive cultures.
