SIDN, the organisation that manages the .nl domain, has been awarded fifteenth place in the Best Employer Awards 2010. Movares and Rijk Zwaan achieved the highest general satisfaction scores and may now use the title of ‘Best Employer of 2010’ for the next year. Menzis and Transmission & Logistiek Nederland secured the prizes for the biggest improvements in general satisfaction. The awards are based on the results of an independent survey of 369 participating organisations by research bureau Effectory.
As well as the overall titles, four theme prizes were awarded. The best score for leadership was registered by vanHaren Schoenen BV, while Bureau Zuidema took the development opportunities prize. Red Bull secured two accolades: the theme awards for working atmosphere and engagement. SIDN was in the top twenty on the leadership and engagement themes.
According to Hanneke Kroneman, SIDN’s HR Manager, there is a good reason for the organisation’s strong performance in the Best Employer Awards. ‘We place a lot of emphasis on employee satisfaction and aim to create a working environment in which people can take pleasure in what they do,’ she says. ‘So, every so often, we have an independent survey done to find out just how satisfied our people actually are. The feedback serves as input for the development of action plans, which everyone then implements together.’
It’s an approach that is clearly bearing fruit, since personnel satisfaction levels at SIDN have been rising steadily since it was adopted. ‘In 2008, our employee satisfaction score was 7.2 and by this year it had gone up to 8,’ says Kroneman. ‘We are very proud of what has been achieved. Our workforce is made up of dedicated professionals with a real enthusiasm for the internet. They are critical, committed and constantly looking for new challenges. This makes reciprocal demands of SIDN’s engagement as employer.’
The people behind .nl
‘SIDN is a unique organisation; no one else has responsibility for the performance of the .nl internet extension. It’s up to us to make sure that more than four million .nl domain names work properly and that tens of millions of websites and e-mail boxes are traceable. Those four million names make the .nl domain the fourth biggest of the world’s 250 or so country-code domains (ccTLDs). Only .de (Germany), .uk (United Kingdom) and .cn (China) are bigger. As a result, we are at the heart of e-commerce in the Netherlands – a big responsibility that we take very seriously. However, even in a world where technology plays such an important role, SIDN puts people first. Because, at the end of the day, it is the people within the organisation who have to ensure that the technology delivers what everyone wants. That’s why we are happy to invest in our people.’
Further evidence that SIDN is a positive, stimulating place to work comes from the weblogs written by the organisation’s employees. At www.werkenbijsidn.nl, a number of contributors provide personal insights into life at SIDN, describing what they do on a day-to-day basis and what they think of being part of ‘the company behind .nl’.
Best Employer Survey 2010
Undertaken by Effectory, the Best Employer Survey is the largest and most reliable poll of employers in the Netherlands. Each year, Effectory identifies the nation’s best employers in each of two categories: organisations with more than a thousand personnel and those with fewer. Each employer’s ranking is based on careful analysis of general satisfaction levels amongst its workforce. Organisations that fail to achieve a threshold satisfaction score (7.3 in 2010), are excluded from Effectory’s list of top employers. As well as the overall and year-on-year improvement awards, four theme prizes are presented, to the employers (of whatever size) that achieve the highest scores for leadership, engagement, working atmosphere and development opportunities.
This year, 100 of the 369 participating employers qualified for inclusion in the Best Employer lists drawn up for each category on the basis of the overall satisfaction scores. The average response rate across the 369 organisations was 68 per cent. In absolute terms, 192,286 workers out of 282,608 completed the questionnaire. In each category, there is one award for the most improved employer and another for the best employer overall.
For more details check out www.sidn.nl
- Follow us on :
