Choice
Who is Choice?
CHOICE has been the ‘voice of the consumer’ for well over 50 years in Australia. With over 170,000 members, CHOICE is Australia’s largest consumer organisation. Their purpose is to work for fair, just and safe markets that meet the needs of Australian consumers and they do this through:
informing consumers through consumer news and investigations mobilising over 100,000 campaign supporters to fight for changes to laws and industry practices
informing consumers through consumer news and investigations mobilising over 100,000 campaign supporters to fight for changes to laws and industry practices analysing and comparing services like banking products and insurance
testing household products in their independent laboratories
helping consumers to find the products and services that are best for them, through apps, digital tools, choice.com.au and their magazines.
As times have changed CHOICE’s core business is evolving. With any big evolution, it is critical to ensure your people are on the journey with you. So for CHOICE, engaging their people and allowing them to be part of and adapt to the new vision was crucial. The process started with redefining their values.
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The Challenge
Our relationship with CHOICE started just over three years ago as they identified that CHOICE employees didn’t agree with their values. Overwhelmingly the feedback from their employees was that the values ‘at the time’ were not a reflection of the brand and didn’t embrace what the employees felt CHOICE really stood for.
Armed with that information, almost two-thirds of CHOICE’s workforce participated in our Values Workshop, with the objective of deriving and creating, the true essence of CHOICE. At the end of the workshop, the three values of Truth, Help and Impact emerged. Values that the employees could connect deeply to (because they were involved in creating them) and that supported the brand’s purpose.
The next step was to embed them into the day to day habits of the team. In 2013 CHOICE identified through their annual employee survey a need to address the low perceptions of reward and recognition. The opportunity to combine the roll out of the new values with the launch of their recognition program made sense.
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The Solution
‘CHOICE Likes’ was launched in January 2014. With a mixture of peer to peer, discretionary and company awards, each very clearly designed to elicit the stories behind how CHOICE’s values are being brought to life on a day to day basis.CHOICE employees can receive a ‘Like’ it, ‘Love’ it, ‘Live it’ and Continuous Improvement award. With nominations also able to qualify for further kudos from the CEO or senior leadership team with the CHOICE Values Award.
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The Results
Many businesses measure the impact of recognition in different ways. At Redii, we like to understand how each business knows if their program is working and how they think it links to the overall measures of company success.
For CHOICE it is all about the mirror effect from employees to consumers.
“The ultimate form of success for us is when consumers are getting a good deal. To achieve that, we need to have a brand that resonates with consumers, to inspire them to support our campaigns, encourage some to become CHOICE members, and motivate them to tell their friends and family about CHOICE. We obviously can’t do this without engaged and motivated staff. These factors are all reflected in our key metrics.” Says Alan Kirkland, CHOICE CEO.
Our current organisational results are strong. The strongest membership levels in 5 years, strong employee engagement score, increased retention of staff, strong NPS, passionate and driven culture. Our turnover was 16% at 2014 FY end, today it’s around 7%