Engaged to the office?

6 June 2008

If you’ve picked up on the flurry of recent surveys about life in London, you might be wondering what statistics actually prove. First off was a report on the 50 best places to work in the UK, with over half the listed companies based in London and Google topping the bill. But then came a survey saying that Londoners were far more likely than the rest of the country to pull a sickie. According to the TNS poll, more than a third of London-based workers admitted to phoning in sick when they weren’t, compared to a national average of 19%.

Finally, a Gallup survey last month named B&Q as the only UK company to win one of its Great Workplace awards, the second time it had done so. This was based on an employee engagement score of 60%, compared to a global average of 28% and a UK norm of just 16%. And you thought B&Q’s salespeople just looked happy because they love power tools…

Taking all these statistics into account, it wouldn’t be hard to conclude that although London boasts some of the best places to work, its staff are most likely to pull a sickie – and we would be nearly four times happier if we went to work at the local DIY store.

So what is it that makes a firm a good place to work – and how can London’s small and medium businesses (SMBs) engender the right kind of environment? The first thing to point out is that smaller businesses aren’t doing at all badly. The figures for the UK weren’t broken out by size, but glancing at the European poll, which helpfully names the top 50 SMBs to work for alongside the top 50 enterprises, there were three UK organisations –the charity Asthma UK, Surrey-based energy consultancy The Structure Group and Impact Professional Services.

Secondly, the secret to success seems to be partly about creating the right sort of environment for workers to thrive in. Google’s Victoria office has video games, massage chairs, hammocks, bean bags, cycles and table tennis tables. Although it sounds more like a youth club than a workplace, the environment is all the more critical because the average Googler works a long day.

Like Google, The Great Place to Work Institute, which produced the research, is headquartered in California. It defines a great place to work as a place where employees “trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do and enjoy the people they work with”. No doubt the thinking is that if you create a culture of trust, pride and enjoyment, people won’t want to call in sick any more.

But surely there’s something else as well – like the fact that your company’s objectives should tally in some way with your employees’ personal or professional goals? Whether that’s through financial reward, a clearly defined career path or simply a belief in the product or service, it’s employee engagement that really gets us out of bed in the morning. B&Q knows that – and while its people love power tools, it loves selling them.

By David Longworth, Webster Buchanan Research