There is a focus on staff engagement, evident in Martins SM’s talk, the latest results and webinar. (Recording is available on PPL website) I have no doubt that staff retention is crucial, hidden costs to business’s are high if staff turnover is also high.

It is difficult to judge culture from the outside but here are a couple of points that may back up managements “talk” about caring for employees.

Recent results slide on employee benefits. I haven’t been in the corporate world for a while, but these look generous to me. There are a couple I would have been happy to have back in my working life. Any comments?

Glassdoor reviews also point to a positive work environment, rating of 4.6 stars with 100% recommendation of CEO and 88% would recommend the company as a good place to work. There were 41 reviews, and the bulk were positive, reviews in the last year rated highly. The one that stood out was a person who felt the environment was too laid back, “come and go as you please”.  PPL’s response was that it valued autonomy in its workplace. This is interesting as the biggest complaint I see with most companies on Glassdoor is micromanagement. My takeaway is, not every culture suits everyone. The Glassdoor reviews gave an overall impression that backs managements claim of high employee engagement.

I then moved onto researching the product panellists, ie. reviewers, technically not employees. What stood out to me was the paid surveys by PPL were considered good value in Aust, that is, it is worth completing the surveys for the compensation received.

I thought I’d sign up and see how easy the platform was to use etc. After reading the privacy disclosure I decided against it. It appears you can opt out of cross tracking from other sites, but I was unable to determine how easy that was. The privacy statement was the easiest I have read in simple language, although I reckon most people probably don’t read it.

Interestingly the overseas reviews from panellists were at odds with the Australian experience. Most reviewers said there was not enough surveys/rewards to warrant the time spent and rated the other big companies as better compensation. My take on this is PPL has a historical Australian focus. So does this make it harder to recruit panellists overseas and how does this impact the quality of the data for international customers. Alternatively, once they increase the survey options for overseas, perhaps they attract more participants.  There seems to be a large contingent of people tracking these sites and talking about them on social media platforms. It was common to see a company considered the best in one country and insignificant in another.

Lastly the question that emerges to me is how do you reach all demographics? It seems to me the people completing the surveys do so because they need the economic benefit, I’m thinking similar to CSL’s blood collection in the US. Although this is probably an issue for all the companies in the space, not unique to PPL.

On the results call, I don’t think anything new emerged that we hadn’t heard in the SM meeting. Results were ok, Revenue and Ebitda increased, loss after tax (2.2)m