Sunil Vohra

Sunil Vohra, co-founder of the world’s first independent and standardised index for measuring organisational culture, The Workability Index, highlights how critical it is for Australian businesses to move to measuring wellbeing as a key metric.

“At the heart of the debate about a four-day working week, there is clear intent to elevate discussions of structural change in how we legislate, solve and measure the wellbeing of employees”, Mr Vohra stated.

The discussion of reducing working hours has been well documented across the globe, primarily due to Sanna Martin, the Prime Minister of Finland, who is a supporter of flexible working hours. While her comments are not formal government policy, they have sparked a global debate about the trade-off of working hours and employee wellbeing.

Such reduced working hour trials have taken place in Sweden, France and Japan in recent years. Mr Vohra explained: “The traditional 38-hour week was legislated in Australia nearly 40 years ago.

However, only 36 per cent of Australians actually work within the traditional 9-5, five day working week.

“The Australian workforce is working longer hours. This is in part due to increased expectations of productivity and competition. The blur in working hours has also been enabled by technology which allows the ‘always on’ expectation to become the norm.

“Given increased time spent on work commitments, we have reached a tipping point that demands a more clearly defined relationship between working conditions and employee wellbeing. “A four-day working week might be impractical for most businesses to adopt – but what every business can do is measure their current employee’s wellbeing.

From this learning, companies can look to make corresponding changes to reflect or improve their wellbeing rating – which might include flexibility around the hourly working week.”

The Workability Index is the new standard for corporate culture, ensuring that all stakeholders connected to the organisation can quickly and easily understand current performance against the respected index.

Mr Vohra continued: “There is this growing movement to redefine the metrics of success.

Historically, countries have determined success by economic measures while companies have done so by revenue and profit. However, the increase in demand for non-financial metrics could lead to structural change within organisations in how we determine success.” “Increasingly for business a range of stakeholders – customers, investors and future employees – want to know more than just financial figures – they want to know about your culture. Previously there has been no publicly available evidence to compare or benchmark against.”

As well as wellbeing, The Workability Index framework measures across 10 critical dimensions of culture: Risk Culture, Trust, Future Workforce, Advocacy, Community, Leadership, Organisational, Inclusion and Engagement.

TWI, which launched early December 2019, has published the initial index of the combined culture scores of member organisations. The current benchmark index for Australia is 615 / 1000.

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Sunil Vohra

The world’s first independent and standardised index creating culture transparency, launched this week, provides companies with the capacity to measure and strengthen corporate culture.

A tangible response to the current crisis in Australian corporate culture exposed by the Hayne Royal Commission, Melbourne-based start-up The Workability Index’s platform also provides companies with strong cultures the capacity to benchmark and highlight their performance.

The Workability Index (TWI) is set to revolutionise the way that organisations assess, report and communicate workplace culture.

TWI co-founder, Sunil Vohra, states that failing to accurately measure and report on organisational culture was the major contributing factor to the types of failings witnessed at organisations like Westpac and AMP.

“It’s universally acknowledged that transparency is the greatest regulator,” Mr Vohra said. “The notion of transparency pivots thinking all the way through the organisation.”

“Until now, organisational culture has largely been viewed as an internal metric, typified by highly bespoke and not always relevant measures,” Mr Vohra said. “We have standardised protocols for reporting financial results, it is now time for this same rigour to be applied to the primary non-financial metric, corporate culture.

Mr. Vohra’s co-founder and People & Culture specialist Kate Stone, noted the lack of standardised data and evidence has limited the ability of many organisations to objectively understand and respond to the workplace culture problem.

“If we are to address these challenges, we need to shift the way we assess culture towards a more outward facing model that drives greater transparency, oversight and accountability across the key dimensions of organisational culture,” Ms Stone explained.

The Workability Index framework measures 10 critical dimensions of culture: Risk Culture, Trust, Future Workforce, Advocacy, Community, Wellbeing, Leadership, Organisational, Inclusion and Engagement.

“The Workability Index is the new standard for corporate culture, ensuring that all stakeholders connected to the organisation can quickly and easily understand current performance against the index,” Mr Vohra added.

TWI has published the initial index of the combined culture scores of member organisations. This TWI score will become the de-facto standard for culture transparency, supported with subindexes tracking specific industries and dimensions.

TWI will soon launch the TWI Leaderboard, recognising Australia’s best-performing organisations.

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