THE FIRST STEP

The first step to being recognised as a great workplace is to voluntarily undertake a paid assessment with a view to being certified and opting to participate in the ‘Best Workplaces’ study.

While all organisations undertaking the Great Place to Work® assessment have the opportunity to be certified upon meeting global standards, participants who submit their results to the Best Workplaces study will additionally be considered for inclusion in the lists of the ‘Best Workplaces in Sri Lanka’ and the ‘Best Workplaces in Asia’ each year.

To qualify for the national Best Workplaces study, an organisation must have 20 or more employees and be a registered entity in Sri Lanka.

TWO LENS MODEL

The Great Place to Work ModelTM considers workplace culture from two perspectives: the employee perspective – whereby the employee’s perceptions of the workplace experience are averaged using the Trust Index© survey; and the manager perspective – whereby the quality of interactions intended through people practices established by the management is evaluated using the Culture Audit© tool.

EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

A unique employee centric framework is used to measure employee perceptions through the Trust Index© survey, a proprietary employee feedback tool developed by Great Place to Work®.

Comprising 59 statements and using a five point Likert scale, the universal instrument measures employee experience and counts for 75 percent of an organisation’s score.

Administered in multiple modes – i.e. email, paper or kiosk depending on the organisation’s requirements – the survey is available in all three local languages.

Through two open-ended questions, the tool captures employee comments about what makes their workplace great and what would make it better. And it encourages employees to submit their opinions and suggestions through anonymous responses.

As for improvement, quantitative survey results can be further verified through qualitative methods such as focus group discussions with selected employee groups to gather root causes for priority areas. Together with survey data, these can be used for action planning by the management team.

PARTICIPATION

To be considered, organisations must meet the Great Place to Work-CertifiedTM standard. To ensure that the outcomes truly represent all employees’ views, it is required that survey results be accurate to a 95 percent confidence level with a five percent margin of error or better.

For organisations that employ less than 1,000 people, all employees were selected to participate in the survey by default while larger organisations were assessed based on a random stratified sampling method.

Going forward, there will be a census survey for all organisations with less than 5,000 employees.

EVALUATION

A strict methodology for maintaining anonymity is followed so that individual responses cannot be tracked by organisations participating in the survey.

A stringent audit process is followed during and after completion of the survey. This provides employees with an opportunity to provide candid feedback on the organisation to maintain the assessment’s credibility.

MANAGER’S VIEWS

The managers’ perspectives and practices established by management are measured by a proprietary tool and evaluation framework called the Culture Audit©. This is a comprehensive questionnaire in which the organisation submits detailed information on the practices it has adopted, which is subject to rigorous evaluation.

This instrument helps gauge not only an organisation’s structure and demographics, but also its philosophy and values, and the manner in which they’re integrated into its people practices. The remaining 25 percent of the overall score is derived from this Culture Audit©.

SIZE CATEGORISATIONS

 This year, organisations were ranked in the list of the 50 Best Workplaces in Sri Lanka based on size categories.

Workplaces with 20-100 employees were considered in the selection of the Best 10 in the ‘Micro’ category. Workplaces with 101-500 employees contributed to the selection of the Best 20 in the ‘Small’ category. Workplaces with 501-1000 employees contributed to the selection of the Best 10 in the ‘Medium’ category. And finally, workplaces with more than 1,000 employees were considered for the selection of the Best 10 in the ‘Large’ category.

POST-ASSESSMENT IMPROVEMENT

In order to improve organisational culture after an assessment, the two lens model can communicate employee feedback to help identify practices that may not be effective or require improvement.

These can be further studied by understanding root causes through focus group discussions with employees as well as an on-site culture audit – a methodology comprising a series of discussions with employees, people managers and practice owners/HR, to understand the implementation and effectiveness of practices submitted.

This data can be used for action planning to improve perceptions and people practices in the organisation, and to create a better employee experience.

Note that this ranking was finalised prior to the Sri Lanka Economic Crisis in 2022 and does not reflect organisations’ roles or responses to their people or community in addressing its impact.