The Australian Financial Review (AFR) is a leading business and finance publication driving thought leadership across industries. The AFR BOSS Best Places to Work competition evaluates and ranks workplaces based on their policies, culture, and employee experience. In 2025, AFR aimed to evolve the competition to reflect the changing world of work and offer more actionable insights.

Challenge

With workplaces evolving rapidly, AFR needed a more sophisticated, scalable approach to assess thousands of employee experiences alongside organisational policies and practices, while maintaining fairness, security, and real-world relevance. The competition needed to move beyond static rankings to provide rich, actionable insights into what makes workplaces thrive. To achieve this, several key challenges needed to be addressed:

Re-imagining Workplace Assessment – Ensuring that the competition reflected the modern realities of work, including hybrid environments, wellbeing initiatives, and evolving leadership models.

Data Volume & Complexity – Managing large-scale qualitative and quantitative data while ensuring objective evaluation.

Security & Integrity – Maintaining confidentiality and ensuring defensible, unbiased scoring.

Actionable Insights – Going beyond rankings to provide meaningful benchmarking and tailored recommendations that drive change.

Solution

Bendelta worked with AFR to evolve the competition beyond rankings, capturing what truly defines workplace excellence. Central to this was Bendelta’s proprietary BEING Human at Work model—an academically grounded and human-centered framework designed to assess and enhance workplace experiences. Rooted in both research and real-world application, it identifies the fundamental elements that enable people to thrive.

To operationalise this approach, a combination of AI-driven analytics, structured evaluation frameworks, and expert insights was applied:

• AI-Assisted Scoring – AI-driven rubrics ensured rigorous, unbiased qualitative assessments.
• AI-Powered Analysis – NLP surfaced key themes and trends across datasets.
• Benchmarking & Tailored Insights – Organisations received comparative insights against top performers, helping them pinpoint areas for improvement.
• Automated Reporting – AI-enabled reporting generated personalised recommendations efficiently and at scale.
• Security-First Approach – Strict data protection protocols and human oversight ensured data confidentiality, privacy, and reliability.

The outcome

By redesigning the competition to reflect the modern workplace and prioritise the human experience, AFR and Bendelta delivered:

• A pioneering, scalable methodology that assessed workplace culture, policies, and employee experience across industries with depth and rigour.
• Deeper insights into best-practice workplace strategies, capturing environmental, cultural, and employee experience factors that contribute to an outstanding human experience at work.
• Highly customised recommendations, enabling organisations to take targeted, data-driven actions to enhance workplace culture and employee experience.
• Enhanced efficiency – AI streamlined the scoring process, allowing human experts to focus on validation, insights, and driving meaningful improvements.

By integrating AI with expert analysis and embedding the BEING model, Bendelta transformed the AFR Best Places to Work competition into a dynamic, high-impact benchmarking tool. This provided organisations with both rankings and a roadmap to help workplaces thrive.