Beam Australia Launches $1.5M World-First Start-up to Improve Diversity, Tackle Employee Burnout & Support Hybrid Working
Flexible work company aims to tackle new risks from hybrid work era following successful trials with NRMA, Metcash and more
SYDNEY, Australia – 11 May, 2021 – Australian flexible work company, Beam Australia, has launched a new cloud-based, data-driven start-up and platform, Beamible, to uncover workforce insights that help organisations improve hybrid and flexible work design, recognise new risks in a hybrid workplace, create a more inclusive workforce and tackle fast-accelerating issues such as employee burnout.
Designed and engineered in Australia, Beamible is a SaaS platform that takes a ‘bottom-up, people-led’ approach to people analytics, and includes a simple user interface to enable all staff, HR leaders and CEOs to use it. The company received $400,000 from the recent Accelerating Commercialisation Grant via the Department of Industry, adding to over $1.1 million raised in private investment.
The platform has been successfully piloted with companies including NRMA, Metcash, General Mills, The TOM Co, and not-for-profit B Lab, with feedback highlighting Beamible has been a major driver in pilot companies’ gender diversity and flexible work programs, a key issue as top Australian companies struggle to move the dial on diversity, particularly in leadership roles.
“Beamible is a tangible way for us to take action on developing a gender-balanced workforce and mainstreaming flexible work,” said Louise Wright, Senior Manager Organisational Culture at NRMA.
“WGEA was particularly interested in this, and specifically that it supports flexible role design for senior roles. We're committed to making real progress on flexible work, gender diversity and productivity in a hybrid-working workforce.”
Beam and Beamible Co-Founders and Co-CEOs Victoria Stuart and Stephanie Reuss believe there is a real opportunity and momentum among enterprises to retire the inflexible ways of working that have kept people who need to work part-time or remotely out of the mid-to-senior level jobs market, and improve diversity.
“We hosted a roundtable with nearly 40 companies and government agencies, including BHP, Xero, Dan Murphy’s, Services Australia and Woolworths, in March and there is a real impetus to reshape the way we work,” said Stuart. “This is about a new era of flexible working and recognising the real business risks that exist around failing to develop inclusion, company connection and leadership capability.”
“While flexible working has become a default promise on job applications, the myth that all roles need to be 40 – or in many cases 80 or more – hours per week is alive and well,” added Reuss. “We’re paving the way for companies that want to flex but struggle to get there with a focus on outcomes. Research categorically shows that failure to recognise part-time work keeps some of the best talent out of the market, and in the vast majority of cases, the best women.”
One of the key issues the platform aims to address is burnout, with around three quarters of Australians suffering from this last year as they worked on average two-to-four extra hours per day and took fewer breaks. It addresses this with data, creating visibility over teams and workloads, easy redistribution of those workloads, reduction in unnecessary meetings, and a focus on outcome-based working.
With the World Health Organisation (WHO) defining burnout as an Organisational responsibility, the company believes putting the systems in place to flag burnout risks, as well as mechanisms to address it, has become a must-have. But at the moment this data is non-existent for organisations as they attempt to gauge their exposure on ‘gut feel’.
Buoyed by the successful pilot program and roundtable discussion with leading Australian companies, the new platform aims to be a catalyst to improve employee wellbeing, fast emerging as a defining issue in post-pandemic leadership. The platform builds on the vision of Stuart and Reuss, Google and CEB veterans respectively, to end rigid, outdated job constructs which keep so many highly capable professionals – mostly women – out of the workforce.
“Beamible supports team-based role design for organisations wanting to give autonomy to their people, while ensuring the work is focused on the right priorities, in the right place at the right time,” said Reuss.
“Through our established business, we’ve created a flexible jobs marketplace and consulting services to help Australian businesses implement practical flexible work solutions to make their workplaces more inclusive,” added Stuart.
Beamible is expected to build on the $25 million in incremental jobs Beam has created since 2016, with female ‘Beamers’ making up 87 per cent of that contribution.
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About Beamible
Beamible focuses the right people on the right work in the right place, and helps organisations empower their people and resolve their most common friction points: Flexible & hybrid work arrangements; transparency & remote team collaboration; workload management & burnout; team & role design; and inclusivity & equality.