2019 Best place to work: Opinium

After a period of rapid growth, Opinium recognised that it was falling behind in a particularly important area – employee wellbeing. As a result, it has spent the past year completely overhauling its approach to mental health in its workplace.

It invested and created a workplace mental wellbeing audit and from those findings – of Opinium and also of the market research industry as a whole – it identified the most important factors affecting wellbeing.

As a result of this audit the agency did a number things including: changing its processes; adding individual flexible working arrangements; introducing ‘development weeks’ to pursue personal projects; training mental health first aiders; and mindfulness workshops.

Beyond the mental wellbeing work, Opinium has extended employee ownership with 33% equity now owned by its staff. To improve diversity, it has also partnered with the Bright Network to attract candidates from BAME and socially disadvantaged backgrounds.

The work has paid off with 97% of staff agreeing that ‘I'm proud to tell others I work here’ and 97% agreeing ‘I can be myself around here'.

It has a 98% retention rate overall with 100% among senior team while revenues and profit have both increased in the past year.

James Endersby, CEO, Opinium said: “I think you could see on the night how delighted we all were with this win. It means a huge amount to us. We’ve created the agency we always wanted to work for. Winning it three times in four years is also something we think is pretty special. Our people are our business, they own our business, and we’ve placed them where they rightfully belong, at the heart of our business, and the results prove it. Over the past years we have completely overhauled our approach to employee wellbeing and thanks to our workplace-mental-wellbeing-audit, we know the most important drivers of workplace wellbeing, helping us accelerate and implement lasting and meaningful change.”