Improved employee engagement: Positioned for the future
Position Partners win a Change Champion Award
Position Partners is a positioning solutions provider, offering a wide range of intelligent systems that increase productivity and safety for surveying, civil construction, building, and mining applications. The company’s 300+ employees work across every state and territory of Australia, along with New Zealand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Position Partners has been working with Voice Project since 2014. The team won its first Change Champion Award in 2021 after improving their overall employee engagement survey scores by 9%.
Strategic Head of People & Culture at Position Partners, Bernadette Taoro Ashin, said she was delighted to see the significant growth in engagement and wellbeing reflected in their latest survey scores.
Supporting a learning environment
Bernadette said Position Partners has taken a strategic focus on organisational development in recent years and this has included offering all-new continued learning opportunities to staff.
“We want to create a continuous learning environment that assists Position Partners in achieving growth, sets us apart from our competitors, and fosters an enriching team culture with highly-skilled and engaged employees!” said Bernadette.
The new learning opportunities not only aim to improve employee ability within their current job, but also provide development opportunities appropriate to their future careers.
Investing in leaders and staff success
“We are also actively investing in our leadership capability - to provide them with the confidence to engage and lead thriving, diverse and growing teams,” she added.
She said Position Partners has made deliberate efforts to recognise and celebrate success, and to communicate a bright and prosperous future.
“We have been taking a more considered approach to reward and resourcing, ensuring that we are rewarding employees for discretionary effort and ensuring that we actively build teams to meet demands,” Bernadette said.
She is happy to see the improvements in employee’s perception of business progress – as well as how Position Partners compares favourably to industry peers.
“There was a significant improvement in survey scores around learning and development, leadership ability and perceptions of leadership, as well as improved cross-unit cooperation.”
“We also achieved high scores on items measuring workplace practices related to organisational purpose - which is testimony to our great ability to retain talent.”
Working well together across locations
“For our managers that lead teams who regularly work from customer sites, our philosophy of ‘hands-on leadership’ is central. These team leaders have dedicated days to meet and work with each of their team members onsite, have regular toolbox meetings and allocate days where they hold team breakfasts/barbeques.”
Leaders of remote teams have also been taught more deliberate ways of remaining connected beyond just the regular team meetings with:
Virtual games
Virtual drinks
Meetings unrelated to work that simply focus on the team’s weekend/personal life
Weekly one-on-ones with the agenda set by the employee
Utilisation of Microsoft Planner/Teams to manage priorities
Connection days/hybrid working model - office based days
“From a company-wide perspective, we have implemented unique approaches to help us with the challenges of engaging a whole business that could not physically meet all of the time.”
These include:
Connection Squads – one hour of power around a topic where people across Position Partners come together to discuss an area of interest with a view to learn from each other and implement ‘quick wins’
Technology that helps facilitate virtual learning
‘Unmissable’ meetings where all employees within a region must attend a meeting once a month where business updates are shared and where participation extends to many employees across that region.
Virtual quarterly whole-of-business updates which are led by the CEO and Executive team
Listening to staff
Bernadette said Position Partners takes a very collaborative approach to any new initiatives, so the significant changes they’ve achieved have been an outcome of listening to feedback on what the business needs and wants.
“As we’ve implemented initiatives, they also have been built with either project teams or representatives from within the organisation, as per best practice.”
Position Partners implemented the following key initiatives that supported these strong results:
A dedicated People & Culture team focusing around learning
Career and Learning pathways for key groups of positions
A new Learning Experience Platform with AI and on-the-job training capability
Subscription to business learning and safety platforms
Sales training
Leadership training with a focus on leading thriving teams and recognition
Change management training
Negotiation training
Leadership coaching
Mentoring
Agile performance review process with an active focus on development
Succession planning for 2/3 layers within the business
New Strategic Objectives and a new Strategic Planning process
Actively promoting current employees in to new/available positions
A new incentive programme
Quarterly company updates
A wellbeing programme
Voice Project provides research-backed surveys that measure employee engagement, leadership capability and customer satisfaction. These state-of-the-art surveys help organisations get the best feedback to drive positive change. Voice Project works with organisations across the not-for profit, private and public sectors. Get in touch.