“We tried a raft of benefits, but nothing actually made people any happier in work.”
Fraser Gordon · Head of People & Culture, engaging.io
Company size
Small, 30 to 99 employees, headquartered in North Sydney with teams across five countries
Segment
Information technology. A consultancy built on five values: curiosity, collaboration, courage, commitment and care
Recognition
Great Place To Work® Certified™, and named on a Best Workplaces™ List every year from 2022 to 2026
engaging.io spent years buying things for its employees. Then it measured what any of it had done for them, and found the honest answer was very little.
That finding is worth more than most of what gets published about workplace culture, because it comes from a company that ran the experiment for long enough to know. On its most recent Trust Index™ Survey, 97% of employees at engaging.io said it is a great place to work, against 60% at a typical Australian company. The consultancy has been named on a Best Workplaces List every year since 2022.
It is an IT consultancy headquartered in North Sydney, with teams in New Zealand, the United States, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Fraser Gordon, Head of People and Culture, is blunt about what a long run of surveys taught the business about spending money on happiness.
“In the end, providing flexibility, supportive working styles, helping people identify and manage stress, and ensuring people see how their contribution impacts the wider business has had a more beneficial impact on mental health, stress reduction and retention than offering money or benefits ever did.”
Fraser Gordon · Head of People & Culture, engaging.io
5 years
Best Workplaces Lists, 2022 to 2026
Listed every year for five years running
Across the Australia and Technology lists, most recently at 8th in the Small category of Australia’s Best Workplaces in Technology 2026.
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97%
Say engaging.io is a great place to work
Against 60% at a typical Australian company.
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5
Countries with a Culture Champion
Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, one representative each.
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8
Time zones to collaborate across
The operating spread engaging.io names as its live challenge.
The Challenge: Culture Without Rigour
engaging.io was running culture work long before it started measuring any of it. There were check-ins. There were values sessions. What the business lacked was a method.
“Our feedback was largely anecdotal or reactive to issues. We would run culture initiatives for check-ins, values and so on, but there was little rigour in the process to how that happened.”
Certification supplied the rigour. What came back first was a result nobody in the leadership team had braced for.
“In all honesty, I think we were surprised how happy everyone was and little needed changing. It served as really good validation that what we did because we thought it was right, actually was right.”
What Five Years of Surveys Surfaced
The useful finding took several cycles to appear, and it would have stayed invisible in a single year of data. Across repeated surveys, engaging.io noticed that employees in different geographical regions were taking the same information quite differently.
That is a difficult problem for a company running one set of values across Sydney, Auckland, the United States, Colombo and Manila. A message written in North Sydney does not arrive the same way everywhere, and nobody in North Sydney is positioned to notice.
The Culture Champions Program puts one representative in each of the five regions. Their brief runs in both directions: embed the company’s culture locally in ways that make sense there, and bring their own region’s culture back so the global team understands it.
The second half of that brief is what makes it work. A champion who only pushes head office messaging outward is a broadcast tower. A champion who also reports back changes what head office writes next.
What Moved the Needle
engaging.io’s wellbeing approach has been narrowed down to one word, which Fraser returns to repeatedly: connection. Connection to each other, to the company’s values, and to what the business is trying to do.
Getting there involved a lot of things that did nothing. The company tried a raft of benefits and measured the effect on how people felt at work, which was negligible. What replaced them was structural: flexibility, supportive working styles, practical help identifying and managing stress, and a deliberate effort to show people how their own contribution lands in the wider business. Fraser reports better outcomes on mental health, stress and retention from those four than from anything else.
Exec Connect
Every senior member of the executive rotates through the entire employee base on a monthly basis, to connect, share, learn and grow. In a company of this size that means every employee gets executive time as a matter of routine, and it means the executive hears from the whole business, including the people who would never book the time themselves.
A one-to-one process everybody uses
engaging.io runs a highly structured one-to-one process that applies to everyone, so middle managers receive the same quality of support from above that they are expected to give their own direct reports. Soft skills training programs sit alongside it. The logic is that a manager cannot hand down a standard of conversation they have never been on the receiving end of.
The way candidates get treated
Recruitment is where engaging.io’s culture gets its first outing with anyone outside the company, and the business treats it that way. Every approach gets a response delivered with sincerity and care. The team tries to meet everyone in person and walks candidates through both the good and the challenging parts of the role, on the reasoning that every job has both.
“We’ve had multiple people who haven’t been successful in applying for roles thank us for an excellent and compassionate process. Sure, we post on LinkedIn, but there is no substitute for human to human interaction when it comes to culture.”
The Results: A Pipeline That Arrives on Its Own
Great Place To Work Australia records that 97% of employees at engaging.io say it is a great place to work, against 60% at a typical Australian company. Unanimity at that level showed up on physical safety at work, on being made welcome as a new starter, on having the resources and equipment to do the job, and on fair treatment regardless of age and of sexual orientation.
engaging.io reports a drop in regrettable attrition, and a talent pipeline strengthened by people hearing about the rankings and approaching the company directly. The Certification travels widely, appearing in email signatures, on the website, in job advertisements and in client pitches.
On fair treatment the company has scored consistently well across protected characteristics, which makes picking a single result difficult. Fraser singles out one anyway, and the reason he gives is specific to the sector engaging.io operates in.
“We are in a female minority industry in the tech sector, so having our female team members not feel prejudiced by that is great.”
What Changed
Five years of Trust Index work, in specifics
- A Culture Champions Program with one representative in each of the five regions, carrying culture both ways
- Exec Connect, rotating every senior executive through the entire employee base monthly
- A single structured one-to-one process used at every level, supported by soft skills training
- Wellbeing spend redirected into flexibility, supportive working styles and practical stress management
- Every candidate met in person where possible, and walked through the hard parts of the role as well as the good
- Survey results shared openly with the whole team, every year
What Comes Next: Eight Time Zones
The challenge engaging.io names for the period ahead is keeping cross-team collaboration effective across eight time zones. It is the cost of the model that gives the company its reach, and it compounds the regional problem the surveys already surfaced. A culture that travels well across five countries still has to survive the practical business of two people needing to talk when one of them is asleep.
Where Culture Work Starts
The most valuable thing engaging.io has published about its own culture is a negative result. It spent money on benefits, measured whether they made anyone happier, and reported honestly that they had not. Very few companies run that test, and fewer still say so out loud, because the spending is easier to defend than the finding. What replaced it costs less and asks more: flexibility, supported managers, executives in the room every month, and people who can see where their own work lands. Five years of survey data is what let engaging.io tell the difference.
