Best Places to Work in Direct Selling 2021
April 1, 2021 Courtney Roush
In April 2021, Neora was featured in Direct Selling News. Co-founder and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Amber Olson Rourke discussed how we balance a virtual work environment and the benefits of in-person time.
Congratulations to all of our 2021 Best Places To Work in Direct Selling Honorees!
6-TIME WINNER – Nu Skin
5-TIME WINNERS – Jeunesse, LifeVantage, Xyngular
4-TIME WINNERS – Plexus, USANA
3-TIME WINNER – MONAT, Scentsy
2-TIME WINNERS – MODERE, Noonday Collection, SeneGence
FIRST TIME WINNERS – The Happy Co., Neora
The best places to work put a lot of stock in employee engagement, and for good reasons. High levels of employee engagement can have a profound and measurable difference on the bottom line, positively affecting morale, retention and loyalty, their quality of life outside the office and employees’ health and safety, as well as company productivity, sales, profitability, product quality and customer service.
Best of all, high engagement has a spillover effect. Engagement is difficult to fake. Consumers can sense when employees aren’t being genuine and, according to Quantum Workplace, 7 out of 10 of them will spend 13 percent more with a company that provides excellent customer service.
As direct sellers, we’re always looking at ways we can raise the bar on the personalized service we extend to independent distributors and their customers. Our ability to do that effectively depends in large part upon our employee engagement efforts—a job that has become considerably more difficult with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic last year.
For more than a decade, Quantum Workplace, an employee engagement software company, has been conducting in-depth surveys with organizations throughout the world, representing nearly every industry sector, in an effort to measure employee engagement. Organizations who know where they stand can make an effort to focus more intensively on the drivers and address the detractors of employee engagement.
The last 12-plus months have disrupted the global economy, the workplace and the home. Our industry is no different from any other from the standpoint that we’ve had to pivot to a predominantly virtual model. Inevitably, this change in work environment has made employee engagement a much more challenging proposition, especially for those companies unaccustomed to remote working arrangements.
Direct Selling News has once again partnered with Quantum Workplace to measure, analyze and, ultimately, honor the industry’s best places to work. The contest is open to any direct selling company in North America with more than 40 employees.
For the purposes of our 2021 Best Places to Work in Direct Selling survey, Quantum compared our survey results with all other Best Places to Work survey results, then held them up against the top three overall Best Places to Work results. Finally, Quantum compared the results of this year’s direct selling surveys against last year’s. We opened nominations August 17, began surveying the submissions October 26 and closed the survey December 18.
This time around, the survey generated 20 percent more participating employees from the direct selling sector, and the results indicated a 3 percent increase in overall engagement score for the direct selling industry. Thirteen outstanding companies made the cut for our 2021 finalists. While each brought unique characteristics to the table, what they shared was a strong commitment to employee engagement. Their success suggests that investing the time and resources necessary to foster engagement and trust long before a crisis will enable your employees and your organization to adapt more quickly when circumstances demand it.
- While the percent of highly engaged employees increased by roughly 8 percent since 2020 for direct selling companies, that figure still lags 6.2 percent behind the national average.
- Since 2020, the direct selling industry saw an increase in favorability in several areas—most notably, perceptions related to recognition, career development and confidence in the future, all of which increased significantly.
- “If I contribute to the organization’s success, I know I will be recognized” increased 9 percent.
- “I see professional growth and career development opportunities for myself in this organization” increased 8 percent.
- “I believe this organization will be successful in the future” increased 8 percent.
- Regardless of company size, direct selling employees have confidence in the people with whom they work most closely and trust that their managers care about them.
- Regardless of company size, direct selling employees are less favorable toward questions related to change management, fair pay, growth and development, and performance expectations. As is common, larger organizations tend to be less engaged with lower favorability when compared with smaller organizations. Large direct selling companies fall behind medium companies on most of the survey questions—28 out of 30 standard items, to be exact.
- However, large direct selling organizations are slightly more favorable when it comes to confidence in the future. More than 90 percent of employees at large organizations say they believe their companies will be successful in the future compared with 88 percent at medium-sized organizations. This perception may be driven by cultural and economic impacts related to COVID-19—that is, these employees trust that their companies can weather the storm and survive the pandemic. Employees at smaller organizations may tend to be less confident overall.
- At medium-sized direct selling organizations, employees are significantly more likely to say they trust their companies to treat everyone fairly. More than 90 percent of employees at medium-sized companies believe their organizations will treat everyone fairly, compared with 83 percent of employees at large direct selling companies. Questions related to diversity, equity, and inclusion have been among the hottest topics for executive teams in 2020 and 2021; organizations are keenly aware of the importance of these items, and many are focusing efforts at improving and enhancing perceptions here.
- Employee engagement has increased significantly for the direct selling industry overall since 2020. Roughly two-thirds of all participating employees are measuring as Highly Engaged (67 percent). In 2020, 59 percent measured as Highly Engaged.
- Perceptions related to recognition and career development increased the most. These two areas have increased by nearly 10 percent since 2020. Sixty-nine percent of direct selling employees see opportunities for growth and development (up 8 percent since 2020), and 70 percent believe they will be recognized for their efforts (up 9 percent since 2020).
- Perceptions of diversity, equity, and inclusion vary by organization size. Medium-sized direct selling organizations were considerably more likely to score highly when employees were asked to consider perceptions of fair treatment. Specifically, 92 percent of medium-sized companies said everyone is treated fairly at their companies, compared to 83 percent at large-sized direct selling organizations.
The report found that when COVID-19 began to spread throughout the United States in early January, employee engagement dipped from 78 percent Highly Engaged to 70 percent Highly Engaged in mid-February, then rebounded to 83 percent Highly Engaged after U.S. restrictions were instituted in late March. This spike represented an 11 percent increase in engagement levels during the same period in 2019. To what can we attribute this bounce upward? Quantum theorizes that during times of economic downturn when friends and family members are losing their jobs, those who are still lucky enough to be employed are finding a renewed appreciation for their jobs and their employers. Communication also is key here: Those companies who communicated early and often—and who, through words and actions, prioritized their employees’ health, well-being, safety and work/life balance—saw a year-over-year improvement in employee engagement.
As we consider the 13 Best Places to Work in Direct Selling, several highlights emerge that clearly have contributed both to their high levels of employee engagement and their resiliency during a challenging year.
Openness to Change/Agility
“We definitely proved that we could accomplish a lot while working in a virtual environment,” says Amber Olson Rourke, Co-Founder and Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at Neora. “Regardless of the physical work location, as long as we are focused on our key objectives, we can get the job done. In the future, I see us creating a good blend of a flexible virtual working environment that also includes enough in-person time to build the relationships and synergy that are hard to re-create virtually.”