Make work better

Workio’s mantra - our guiding star - is to make work better.

Three simple words must mean it’s a simple idea, right?

In fact, the more you peel away the layers, the more complex this idea gets. The classic five questions can shed more light on this: who, what, when, where, how?

Employee empathy

The idea for Workio came from my experience as an employee and as an employer. We’ve always been focused on making work better for the employee first and foremost, as this naturally leads to work being better for the employer, or senior manager, too.

Our product is built to understand employees from their own point of view. We’re not a top-down, directive company, attempting to bend employees to their employer’s will. We’re a bottom-up approach. We think in systems, and employees are actors in these organic systems rather than cogs in metal machines.

Everything is connected

What are we trying to improve about work? We’re very focused on Workio having a holistic approach to making work better.

We find out from employees how they feel about all sorts of aspects of work, from personal interactions, to purpose and mission, to their role, to progression, and more. We’ve boiled down the things that employees care about most to fifty questions across ten categories. Feedback from users is that we aren’t missing anything that is even a little important to employees in general.

We’d love you to give us a try and let us know if you think we’ve missed something.

Long-term relationships

Workio is intended to be a long-lasting company who partner with our customers on an ongoing basis.

Using our tool, companies can track their culture over time - seeing if they are meeting their employees’ needs more and more closely, or recognising when things are going wrong in one area or another of their organisation.

We aren’t building this business to flip it. We believe in the deep need of employers to understand their employees in a structured way, and of employees to be heard and understood as people.

Everywhere employees are, we want to be

Workio intend to be an international company. We’re already working with some companies with offices across Asia and the US as well as in the UK.

We also don’t think of ourselves as a white-collar tool only. We want to be used in factories, hospitals, on the street, in remote workers’ homes, in shops, anywhere including traditional offices.

We’ve carefully built our model and approach to be relevant to all employees regardless of the industry or location in which they work.

At the moment, we’re English language only, but we intend to be multilingual as soon as possible.

Ethically sourced data

We don’t want to be Big Brother.

We don’t like the idea of passive monitoring - it feels creepy and invasive. And it feels like it’s something done to employees, not for employees.

And then deriving insight from data such as movement tracking, or communications network analysis, is incredibly computationally inefficient and error-prone.

We have the luxury that employees are people, and are therefore able to answer questions. The key, which we think we have found in Workio, is to ask questions that are well-designed, and be trusted enough for employees to give true answers to straight questions.

By having a fully standardised, quantitative approach (where employees rate things on a scale), we enable employees to feel protected against identification. Also, our questions are largely neutrally phrased so that we avoid value judgements, particularly about other people in the organisation such as employees’ managers or peers.

Our overall approach here is that we care about employees first of all, and we have a carefully thought-out method for understanding their needs and desires, and what’s most important to them.

It’s amazing how many other ‘employee engagement’ tools ignore the fundamental humanity of employees. At Workio we don’t just accept it - we believe in it, and view it as a massive strength that is being wasted right now.

When we put it like that, don’t you want to make work better too?

If so, join us on our journey to do just that.