Meld Studios placed in Top 5 Best Places to Work

Each year the Australian Financial Review (AFR) recognises organisations that are pioneering new ways of working and pushing boundaries when it comes to workplace policies and practices.

To receive this recognition, shortlisted entrants must demonstrate the essential characteristics of a contemporary organisation where employees feel motivated and engaged at work.

These characteristics include:

• purpose
• autonomy
• choice
• empowerment
• flexibility
• mastery
• challenge
• learning
• wellbeing
• connectedness
• belonging
• democracy
• equality.

Meld Studios is delighted to be ranked amongst the AFR Top 5 Best Places to Work in the Professional Services industry across Australia and New Zealand.

This accolade acknowledges the commitment Meld has made over the last 15 years to challenge the status quo and experiment with alternative approaches to business ownership, structure, decision making, roles, job titles, pay and promotions — and it strengthens our resolve to keep at it! 

The image below summarises the objects of design that we co-create and experiment with at Meld:

Oh! Tell me more about these experiments.

Meld Studios was founded in 2009 with a mindset and commitment to bust through traditional approaches to business and people management.

Over the last 15 years we have experimented with alternative structures, roles, titles, business management and decision-making models, cultural rituals, and operational ways of working.

Achievements that we're super proud of include:

• an Advocacy and Due Diligence Framework that helps us to challenge the status quo and make more equitable, sustainable, and just choices about who we work with, who we hire, and how we run our business
• open book finances and business decision-making with logic connecting back to our mission, strategies, and priorities
• a Responsibilities & Compensation Framework that defines individual role responsibilities, outlines our collective cultural and commercial commitments, provides full pay transparency, removes line managers and enables employee self-promotion & self-accountability (with a People & Culture support structure available for situations that fall outside the norm and can't be self-managed)
• influencing legislation to bring a new employee ownership model to the Australian market, and becoming the first Australian company to be Employee Owned by Trust (2021).

Pushing boundaries, pioneering new approaches, and co-designing all of it with our people, can often feel relentless, overwhelming, and exhausting. We often wonder if we're making it all too hard for ourselves. Sometimes the status quo feels like an easier path. Then, along comes some incredible public recognition that encourages us keep at it!

In 2022 we were named Good Design Team of the Year, in recognition of the consistently high quality and impactful work we do co-designing ways to create a more equitable, sustainable and just society.

And now in 2024, we have received this recognition for the work we do co-designing our own business: AFR Top 5 Best Places to Work in Australia and New Zealand (Professional Services category).

Can I ask you about this stuff? 

For sure!

Message us via hello@meldstudios.com.au and we'll arrange a time to talk.

Come along to this Culture First free online talk on Friday 10th May @ 12pm. 

Opening the Books: Navigating Pay Transparency

Join our MD, Ali Sharp, and the owner of Movement Therapy, Daniel Murphy, to hear about their organisational journeys to embrace pay transparency.

You'll hear about the benefits and challenges that have come with approaching pay in a whole new way.  

Register here