It’s a well-known business adage that happier workers are more productive workers, and lately a lot of evidence has emerged to prove it. An experiment at Britain’s University of Warwick, for example, showed that more satisfied employees were, on average, 12% more productive than their peers.
This also happens to be the philosophy behind a growing Australian firm Career Money Life. The tech company, based in Melbourne, Australia, is making it easier for businesses to support their employees’ personal and professional needs through its innovative platform.
Clients can choose between hundreds of different pre-vetted and peer-reviewed services and service providers for their employees, including everything from career transition and parental leave to financial education and rewards programs.
By evaluating the third-party providers ahead of time, Career Money Life won the Gold StevieⓇ Award for Innovative Use of Technology in Human Resources in the 2018 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards. They say clients are able to enjoy a more consistently positive experience. The company boasts that employers save considerable time and money because the platform removes the administrative work associated with vetting, paying, and managing suppliers.
A Simple, Comprehensive Platform
For Sandy Hutchison, the company’s founder, the perilous nature of the modern workplace became all too apparent in 2013. A successful veteran of the human resources field, she was a partner at Mercer and served as HR director at the Marsh & McLennan Companies. Even so, her company cast her as “redundant,” and she was suddenly faced with the uncertainty many unemployed workers feel.
Hutchison’s experience in HR led her to believe that most companies simply didn’t have the resources to manage multiple service providers to help employers in her situation. She saw Career Money Life as the solution: a pre-vetted list of offerings that companies could adopt with significantly less time and effort.
The firm’s marketing proposition is all about simplicity. Employers get to choose the programs and services they want to offer, and they set a budget for each worker. Clients can manage their spending limits, invoices, and account activity directly through the portal.
“Compared to other professions, the uptake of digital technology and its capability in HR has been quite slow,” says Hutchison, who continues to serve as the company’s top executive. “We feel our progress to date has shown that HR is slowly starting to adopt digital technology and realize its benefits.”
Since its inception in 2014, the organization’s rise has been nothing short of remarkable. Proving to be a breakthrough year, 2018 has seen the onboarding of several high-profile clients, including New Crest Mining, the wealth management provider MLC, and the online apparel and art retailer Redbubble.
A Bigger Role for Women
Given its mission, it’s fitting that Career Money Life has tried to make work-life balance part of its ethos. Hutchison says her employees are encouraged to pursue outside interests, including travel, family, and educational pursuits. She also adopts a flexible approach when it comes to working remotely. The company allows team members to be wherever they want, as long as they’re able to perform well.
“At Career Money Life, we built the business from its inception to operate in a virtual way, leveraging all the digital tools and technology available to make us lean and efficient,” says Hutchison. “This approach is successful for us, due primarily to our clear processes and use of collaborative technology, which ensure everyone is aware of what is happening.”
Not surprisingly, the female-led firm cites inclusion as one of its primary values. It not only offers its clients programs for parental leave and diversity, but it’s building a workforce that takes those issues to heart.
Hutchison is also using her platform as a successful businesswoman to advance female leaders across the country. To that end, she holds board positions on the Australian Gender Equality Council and Women and Leadership Australia.
She’s hoping the Stevie Award shows other women how much they can accomplish.
“Through the recognition we receive, I want to inspire more females to try tech entrepreneurship, even if they don’t come from tech backgrounds,” she says.
The Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards are the only regional program to recognize innovation in every facet of the workplace, from management and product development to customer service, human resources, marketing and more.
The Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards are open to all organizations in the 22 nations of the Asia-Pacific region: Large and small, for-profit and non-profit, public and private. The awards focus on recognizing innovation in all its forms, wherever it is achieved in the workplace. Entries are accepted in seven languages.
Australian research and innovation has potential for huge positive impact in the real world, if innovators can just connect to the right scientific and technical experts. 
Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie Award winners in the various categories were 
The 2017 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards have recognized organizations in 15 nations including Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the U.S.A. and Vietnam. More than 700 nominations about innovative achievements in the 22-nation APAC region were considered by the judges this year.
The Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards are open to all organizations in the 22 nations of the Asia-Pacific region. The awards focus on recognizing innovation in all its forms, wherever it is achieved in the workplace. Entries will be accepted in seven languages – Chinese, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay and Thai - in the following awards category groups:
Kumar and his team at The Spaceship specialize in blending the creative and the commercial with an entrepreneurial flair, and bring to each project a deep level of strategic thinking and industry knowledge honed by years of experience working with blue chip brands.
We talked with Kim Sung-lyul, Vice Minster at the MOI, about the challenges his office was addressing; what winning the Gold and Grand Stevie Awards had meant to his department; and what the department was planning for the coming year.
