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Give your people a voice with a tailored Xref Engage survey.
Increase retention and reduce turnover with quick employee feedback from an Xref Pulse Survey.
Are you working in an organisation where you want to improve employee satisfaction? Or are you interested in some success stories from great places to work? Look no further.
In this blog, we speak with Aaron Silvestro, Senior Consultant with Xref Engage about his experiences working with a range of organisations that have achieved some incredible employee engagement and satisfaction results.
Read on to get to know Aaron better and understand why surveying your people and hearing their feedback has created real and positive change for some well-known organisations.
Aaron is a Senior Consultant with Xref Engage. His role is to partner with organisations to design listening strategies, such as online surveys, for workplaces to gather actionable feedback with the goal of organisational improvement.
With a background working at charities and counselling individuals through Lifeline, Aaron has done some “really powerful work.” Many of his conversations focused on respect and relationships both in personal and professional life.
His interest in knowing how things worked, wanting to fix problems and making things better led him to combine his education in business with workplace psychology. His experience with online marketing fostered a passion for data and helping organisations to promote their purpose. But it was the human side that appealed to Aaron.
During his time at Xref Engage, Aaron has worked with over 200 customers on over 800 projects. This means he has run multiple surveys for repeat organisations.
Aaron takes pride in having experience with a range of different organisations, learning from each survey.
“We get insights into lots of organisations. We get to see what's working and what's not working.
The insights we can share really help organisations to learn faster and not have to start from scratch. I think that might be part of why the Xref Engage model is so successful - because when we get a result, we've probably seen it before. We can use past experience.
We know the questions to ask, how to follow up and how to dig into it. We can help clients start a brainstorm on the things they can do to really move that dial quickly.”
Aaron talks about working with customers on an ongoing basis. “When you work with customers for a long period of time, it’s lovely because you become another member of their team. You know what they are doing and what they want to achieve. You understand the decisions they make. This can be really helpful in the consultative process.”
Aaron works with many local governments across Australia. One local council in particular stands out to Aaron.
“Glenorchy City Council - under Tony McMullen - has shifted their focus towards value-based leadership. The Council pay close attention to the employee voice, which has seen engagement and culture shift substantially. Now, Glenorchy City Council have been recognised with a Best Workplace Award. This has energised and strengthened the capability of the organisation to serve its community.”
Three more of Aaron’s stand-out customers who have had excellent survey results are Deaf Connect, Hungry Jacks and Holdsworth disability support.
Deaf Connect has worked with Xref Engage since 2018. They’ve grown from 200 staff to 600 and have weathered multiple mergers and acquisitions all whilst improving their employee engagement and satisfaction results.
Similarly, the Hungry Jack’s success story throughout COVID has made them a stand-out client for Aaron.
Hungry Jack’s is a values-driven organisation. “During COVID, Hungry Jacks had a large number of casual workers who could have been laid off because many of the stores they worked in had to be closed during lockdowns. Those casual workers did not qualify for any Government support.”
“Instead of laying off their workforce, and, to ensure the casual employees retained an income, Hungry Jack’s tried to either relocate their people or if they were unable, Hungry Jack’s chose to continue to pay their employees regardless of the lack of work.”
Aaron admires the Hungry Jack’s approach to maintaining their values-based approach. “They recognised that all their workers are part of the team. The continued efforts to pay their people shows they care. Hungry Jack’s are very clever, very smart operators, but they blend that with values as second nature. They've got a strong guiding light. It’s lovely to work with organisations like this.”
Aaron offers another positive case study of Holdsworth finding success in high levels of employee retention.
“During COVID,” Aaron explains, “Holdsworth had a waiting list of people wanting a job with the organisation because, despite not offering the highest pay (as they are a Non-Profit organisation), candidates understood Holdsworth to be a great employer that looked after their people.”
Holdsworth won a 2023 Xref Engage Great Place to Work Award. Holdsworth team members recognise that they do great work with vulnerable communities and they have a passion for what they do. Their work is respected and they have an impact on people’s daily lives.
There’s nothing quite like the excitement of getting your employee engagement strategy underway and wanting to learn from your people to make positive organisational change.
One of the biggest challenges Aaron faces is balancing the energy and excitement of an organisation about to conduct their first survey, with ensuring the all-important due diligence is in place for the best results.
“Doing the groundwork for a survey is vital. The confidentiality, anonymity, and technical elements all matter. The organisations I work with all have this inspiration and energy and I’m trying to say, we just need to do a few of these admin tasks to ensure a successful and safe process.”
Taking the time to educate your people about the survey process, what it will measure and how action will be taken on the results are key to getting buy-in from your employees. The more your people trust and understand the process and outcomes, the more likely they are to participate.
At Xref Engage, Aaron is primarily responsible for running Quality of Care surveys with vulnerable groups. His focus is to make workplaces safe not just for employees but other groups as well.
Aaron often puts himself in the shoes of the survey respondents as a strategy to ask the right survey questions and reveal strong results.
“When surveying people, we need to make sure that giving feedback is a safe and trusted experience. The organisations I consult with are often in industries with vulnerable people - children, elderly or people with disabilities so the experiences of all the people at these organisations can be sensitive.”
“A strong employee engagement strategy can actually be a really powerful way to help people improve the world around them. My role at Xref Engage is to really try to make sure that we're providing a voice to people who otherwise don't have one.”
A key goal for Aaron is to find ways for all employees to experience job satisfaction. He believes that by feeling that they are able to bring their genuine self to work and be honest, they can succeed and thrive in the workplace.
To achieve this end goal, Aaron needs to set employers up to receive valuable employee feedback and then measure employee engagement levels.
“We look at ways to help set up employers for success in the survey process.”
To do this, it’s important to ask the right questions.
“One aspect we often look at is how to build workplace culture as a method to encourage employees to stay engaged. Building company culture can be for a whole range of reasons -diversity or inclusion for example.”
Aaron recognises that workplace culture is always evolving and there are plenty of other areas, outside of culture, that impact employee engagement and satisfaction so maintaining a great place to work requires continuous improvement. This means organisations need to repeat the survey process - looking for insights and taking action.
The foundation for a successful survey lies in understanding the individual customer:
These questions help to set up a survey that elicits high-quality insights for actionable results. Aaron’s role then is to ensure that feedback is robust - is the feedback fair? Even if it is uncomfortable to admit.
The next step is change. Aaron acknowledges change is hard. “What we're really trying to do is to set organisations up to make successful change, driven by feedback. The feedback creates a common goal and is a driver to help organisations get on the same page, uniting on what the change is going to be and why that change is being made. Then, we find there is typically support for that change and organisations can move forward.”
Aaron is excited to be part of positive organisational change. “Surveying provides your people with a mechanism to speak up and put forward suggestions of what would really make a difference in their working lives. It's amazing how sometimes the little things can really improve a lot.”
When speaking about success and fulfilment in his role as a Senior Consultant, Aaron recognises that levels of improved organisational performance depend on the individual business and what they are trying to achieve.
“Once a survey is complete and all feedback is collated, what’s behind the metrics are real human stories. You might only find the data shows an improvement of five or seven percent, but what that data really shows is that your employees understand your efforts to improve their working conditions and people are finding ways to thrive at work. They're getting support. They're getting better care if they need it.”
Aaron also identifies that broader success for organisations is about profit. Without profit, organisations won’t exist and we need organisations so we can work and live. But there is power in motivated people wanting to contribute to that profit. Individuals take company success as their own success.
When organisations succeed, they tend to hire more. When they're hiring people, those people are fulfilled and those individuals drive the organisation to be more successful.
Aaron explains, “Everybody has to go to work to make a living. There's this huge potential that workplaces can be really empowering. They give us a sense of purpose. We get a sense of achievement. We can also grow both professionally and as individuals.
So, if people can take ownership of their work and grow and do better in their work, they're going to have a lot more enriched lives and as a result, the organisation is going to thrive.
Most of us have to work and with the right feedback, work has the real potential to be something rewarding. Whether you’re an employee or employer, it’s human nature to want to contribute by leaving everything better than you found it.”
When reviewing employee feedback from completed surveys, Aaron identifies two strong trends that are impacting employee engagement and satisfaction. The first is employee wellbeing and the second is workplace flexibility.
Workplace attitudes towards wellbeing are changing, Aaron explains. The attitude of companies today is that they need to support their people. “Psychosocial safety legislation is reinforcing the trend that organisations need to be a safe place to work.”
Workplace flexibility is still maintaining its popularity as an important reason for employee retention. For every workplace that believes hybrid work and workplace flexibility are now a thing of the past, there are others who continue to provide this as a way to entice top talent to join their organisation.
Aaron’s experience as a Senior Consultant with Xref Engage has allowed him to uncover interesting workplace trends and offers him deep insights into what makes people tick.
By providing a method for employees to share their feedback, Aaron can guide businesses to achieve organisational success.
Aaron is passionate about seeing positive change and he is delighted to share some key success stories of customers who he has supported throughout his career with Xref Engage.
Aaron Silvestro has over a decade of empowering organisations to thrive. Aaron leads projects to improve employee and client engagement, leadership development, gender equity, diversity and inclusion, and ethical culture. He supports the research and design of Xref Engage’s survey products.
With a Master’s degree in Organisational Psychology from Macquarie University, Aaron specialises in measuring the unseen elements of culture and change management.
He has been invited to speak at conferences and industry events. Topics include Driving Employee Engagement, Building a Speaking-Up Culture, and Value-Based Leadership.
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