mibusiness

WRITER Dr Ben Ashby

In optometry, we often talk about precision, patient health outcomes, and clinical excellence. But behind every successful patient interaction is something less tangible and equally powerful: workplace culture.

Culture is the invisible architecture of every workplace. It shapes how teams collaborate, how clinicians make decisions, and how organisations respond to change. It is the secret ingredient to ensuring healthcare services meet the high quality and safety standards required to enable equitable care that prevents vision loss and changes lives through better sight.

Dr Ben Ashby, Clinical Services Director for Specsavers Australia/New Zealand, discusses the key factors driving successful workplace culture.

At Specsavers, we believe wholeheartedly that good culture isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ – it’s the foundation of everything we do and imperative in achieving our goals. Neither is good culture a ‘set and forget’ – it requires constant listening, feedback, and growing. It’s a journey, and while we are immensely proud of the culture we have created at Specsavers, we know there is always more we can do. We are committed to continually listening and acting on feedback to ensure each of our optometrists and team members feel they have the tools and support to have a rewarding and fulfilling career.

WHY I FEEL QUALIFIED TO TALK ABOUT THIS

I’m hugely proud that Specsavers was named the 2nd Best Place to Work in New Zealand and the 4th in Australia by Great Place to Work in 2025. The Australian ranking is based on confidential feedback from 158,749 employees surveyed this year, making it the largest workplace culture assessment in the country’s history.

With more than 1,200 of our optometrists completing the third-party, anonymous survey alongside thousands of other team members, we are confident that the results are a true reflection of our people’s experience at Specsavers. In the survey, over 85% of our optometrists said Specsavers is a great place to work and described themselves as proud to be a Specsavers optometrist. Most of our optometrists said they are encouraged to balance their work and personal life, are given responsibility, offered training and development, and that people care about each other.

The survey is an opportunity to hear directly from our people – to understand what we’re already doing well and can continue to dial up, and where there are opportunities to do better. For us, this recognition is incredibly meaningful because it’s our people sharing how they feel about our company.

GOOD CULTURE ENABLES BETTER HEALTH OUTCOMES

A good company culture needs to be built on a strong foundation; a shared vision or cause that everyone in the team works toward.

When I speak with optometrists across the industry and healthcare practitioners in general, the vast majority share the overarching ambition of wanting to make a meaningful difference in their patients’ lives every day. It’s why they decided to pursue their career and what makes them turn up to work each day.

At Specsavers, we’ve taken this and made it our core purpose and an unwavering commitment. This culture of responsibility and passion fuels everything we do, inspiring us to continually challenge ourselves and redefine what accessible healthcare means. It’s why we’ve built a workplace where clinical autonomy is protected, and patient health outcomes are the first priority.

This has led to significant investments in technology as well as development and care pathways to support our highly skilled optometrists in delivering clinical excellence. In the past few years, we have seen significant improvements in detection rates for eye conditions such as glaucoma, and we’ve registered over one million appointments through our partnership with Diabetes Australia’s KeepSight program, improving eye test adherence rates for people with diabetes by 20%.
Culture enables this. When clinicians are encouraged in their passions and feel trusted and supported, they’re empowered to do what they do best – provide best care for the patient in front of them.

LISTENING, LEARNING, AND ACTING

Good culture is built on continuously listening, learning, and then acting. Without each of these elements, culture fades and team members can start to feel like they aren’t appreciated or respected.

At Specsavers we do our best to actively pursue feedback to understand the real experiences of our team members. We utilise formal feedback tools like the Annual Colleague Engagement (ACE) survey and the Great Place to Work survey, and we hold focus groups to dig deeper into the results. We also provide support and training to encourage more informal ongoing conversations with team members. These allow us to gather constant, real-time feedback from team members at every level of the business. We also hear from our customers consistently through the InMoment platform.

But listening is only the first step and what matters equally is what we do with the feedback we hear.

I’ve worked for Specsavers for 11 years and see daily how the business acts on feedback and uses it to refine processes and build new programs – whether groundbreaking, high-investment changes or smaller changes in the way we work that make a difference for our team members and patients. It was feedback from optometrists who completed our graduate program that led to the development of the Early Career Optometry program. This program now provides this cohort with ongoing development opportunities like clinical and non-clinical workshops, courses, and access to a support network to foster professional growth and strengthen long-term career foundations. It was also feedback from our optometrists that led to the current roll out of the advanced dry eye therapies, intense pulsed light (IPL) and low level laser therapy (LLLT).

Feedback is a gift, and if you can create a workplace where people feel safe, heard, and inspired to do their best work, you will have a culture that enables your team members to have rewarding and fulfilling careers.

“… listening is only the first step and what matters equally is what we do with the feedback we hear”