Lord Price: To raise productivity, make people feel happy at work

Lord Mark Price, WorkL Founder and former Waitrose Managing Director and former Conservative trade minister meets for lunch with Alex Ralph, Chief Business Correspondent at The Times to discuss his mission to revolutionise workplace happiness through data and his belief that Britain’s productivity crisis stems from fundamentally unhappy workers.

Mark reveals how his transformative experience at John Lewis Partnership – where employee happiness was deemed the “supreme purpose” – now drives his ambitious plans to take his employee sentiment platform WorkL global, armed with the world’s richest database of how workers truly feel about their jobs.

“The very first day there … the managing director of the Southampton department store, a guy called Brian O’Callaghan, who became a great mentor for me, sat us all down and said ‘the supreme purpose of the John Lewis Partnership is the happiness of the people that work in the organisation’,” Price recalls.

He adds: “That was a pretty wild concept. But then, of course, as I spent time there, the real message is if you put your employees first, they’ll deliver for your customers and you’ll have a better business. And it’s about how you leverage your employees to the maximum.”

Read the full article on The Times here: Lord Price: To raise productivity, make people feel happy at work