As Engage Squared has grown bigger, it’s our people that have had the biggest impact. From our three founders on the first day in Melbourne, to 70+ staff around Australia, New Zealand, APAC and Europe, it’s important that we grow acknowledging the importance of our people. Last year we initiated our Community and Culture programme with great success; so as we celebrate its first year we wanted to share some of the wonderful learning, fundraising, internal process improvement and community based activities that we have done.
What is the Community and Culture programme?
Our employee-led Community and Culture programme meets once a week and aims to give employees at Engage Squared the power to help drive internal initiatives, corporate social activities and support charitable causes. Ultimately, we strive to maintain being one of Australia’s best places to work, with a team who are proud of our internal culture and contribution to our local communities.
Why do we do it?
With such a focus (and rightly so) on employee experience technologies, we do have to also ask, are we doing enough for our employees outside of providing them with the right tools to do theirs jobs? Are they feeling satisfied with how their company operates and what they represent? Are we doing more to ensure they’re proud and happy at work? Employee satisfaction more than doubles when employees report that their organisation has a thriving workplace culture (87% vs. 43%) and are 13 times more likely to be highly engaged when they have positive employee experiences (octanner). This positive effect on our employees, coupled with the impact we can make in the community, is what drives us.
We all have the ability to drive positive change and improve our team’s happiness and job satisfaction. It gives our teams the power to take more control of how the business contributes to community and culture, supporting ideation forums, assigning project management time and providing financial support. This programme matters because going to work and loving your job is so much more than just delivering projects; it is about being supported, feeling valued and giving back – and that is what we aim to do.
Our Sydney team enjoying tennis to celebrate Men’s Health Week
How do we do it?
This year, we ran some amazing campaigns, and were able to support so many fantastic causes, donating over $7,000 to various charities, and raising awareness for social issues affecting some of the most vulnerable people in Australia. Our Change Champions have been at the forefront of delivering this work and ensuring that we, as a company, are making an impact to those who live and work within in our communities.
Here are some of the campaigns we supported in 2021:
- International Women’s Day
- National Reconciliation Week
- Men’s Health Week
- UN Women’s Trek for Rights fun run
- R U okay day?
- Trans Awareness Week
- Movember
- Christmas food drive in Melbourne and Sydney
A moment of peace during our burnout lunch and learn with Dan Bessant
We also welcomed some fantastic speakers to present at our internal company meetings and would like to thank them for giving us their precious time to further educate and share crucial information.
- Dan Bessant from Reset Hub who spoke to us about burnout and how to manage it to ensure better health and wellbeing
- Carla McGrath who came in to educate us on how to give a respectful Acknowledgement of Country. She kindly let us record the session and this has now become part of our onboarding process
- Marti Winkworth from Queensland Police who spoke to us about Trans Allyship in the workplace
- Charmaine and Jason Mumbulla at Mumbullacreative from our client ALS, came in for an open and honest discussion around the history of first peoples of Australia. They are also working with us to design our very own artwork!
We also ran a heap of internal initiatives including, but not limited to:
- Lunch n Learns – for the techies and non techies amongst us, we delivered sessions from how to give a respectful acknowledgement of country, to power virtual agents for beginners
- Feedback bot – an internal feedback bot that our employees can interact with through teams to gather feedback on their work
- Increased training budgets for each employee approved
- Reconciliation Action Plan submitted to enable us to take meaningful action to advance reconciliation in Australia
- Flexi working policy updated to ensure our employees can make work, work for them
- Created an internal SharePoint site for quick access to info, resources and links our employees can reference
Women from our Melbourne office enjoying IWD lunch
We hope that you have taken some of inspiration from the work we have been doing over the last year, and we look forward to growing, leaning and taking more action in 2022!
If you would like more more information on anything covered in this blog, please get in touch to find out more.