By Jane Wundersitz, founder of WunderTraining and Australia’s only VIA Character Strengths Master Trainer. Findings drawn from an original analysis of 6,296 adult VIA Character Strengths profiles collected through WunderTraining programs across Australian workplaces between 2019 and 2026.
What do Australians believe is best about themselves at work? For a decade, I have used the VIA Character Strengths survey with teams across government, education, corporate, community, law enforcement and industrial organisations. For this analysis I examined 6,296 adult profiles — all completed on the current version of the survey, so every comparison is like-for-like — one of the largest single-instrument practitioner databases of its kind in Australia.
Some of what I found confirms what I see in rooms every week. Some of it genuinely surprised me.
The most common signature strengths (a strength ranked in a person’s top five) are not the ones organisations talk about most. They are moral strengths:
The most common pairing in the country is Honesty + Kindness, appearing together in the top five of 36% of people, with Honesty + Fairness just behind at 33%. Before Australians bring energy, creativity or strategy to work, they bring integrity and care. Culture-building that ignores this moral core is building on the wrong foundation.
At the other end of the rankings sit the strengths that almost never make a top five:
Think about what performance cultures ask for: energy, drive, discipline, self-management, courage. The data shows these are the strengths Australians least identify with. Organisations are routinely asking people to lead from their rarest strengths — while the strengths people hold in abundance, like honesty, kindness and fairness, go unnamed and underused.
Here is the finding that surprised me most. This database spans 2019 to 2026 — a pandemic, lockdowns, the great resignation, the return-to-office battles, a cost-of-living crisis. You would expect the character of the workforce to show the scars.
It doesn’t. Tracked year by year on the same instrument, the strengths Australians identify with are remarkably stable. Kindness, Love, Perspective, Perseverance, Leadership and most of the other 24 strengths barely shift across seven years. Whatever the era did to our circumstances, our sense of who we are at our best held firm.
Against that stable backdrop, three genuine movements stand out:
Love of Learning surged from 22% of people pre-pandemic to 30% during the lockdown years — then eased back year by year (28%, 25%, 23%) as normal life returned. A true pandemic story: a rise, a peak, and a slow tide going out.
Fairness has climbed steadily and without interruption: 45% → 47% → 50% → 51% → 53%. Not a COVID spike — a sustained, year-on-year rise. In an era of flexibility negotiations, pay-equity attention and hybrid-work bargaining, fairness is becoming more central to how Australians see themselves at work. For leaders, the implication is direct: perceived unfairness now lands on a workforce increasingly primed to notice it.
Honesty held steady around 64–67% for years, then jumped to 72% in the most recent two years of data. It is too early to declare a trend, but it is the movement I will be watching most closely.
With sectors mapped across the database, distinct character profiles emerge — each one a strength story:
The database includes 209 law enforcement profiles, and they carry one of the most distinctive signatures of any group:
The composite portrait — honest, funny, discerning, brave and steady under pressure — is a psychologically coherent picture of a profession built for resilience, and a strong foundation for leadership development in policing and emergency services.
— 36% of people carry both in their top five. Straight-talking care might be the national workplace character in four words.
Just 3 people in 100 count energy and vitality among their signature strengths — worth remembering next time a job ad demands "high energy."
— up eight points since 2019, climbing every single year, in a period when almost nothing else moved.
— and they also report the most vitality of any sector. Heart and energy, in the workforce that needs both most.
— and it faded. Love of Learning jumped by a third during COVID, then drifted back almost to baseline as offices reopened.
This analysis is based on 6,296 unique adult profiles completed on the current VIA survey (VIA-IS-P) through WunderTraining workshops and programs in Australian organisations between approximately 2019 and July 2026. Profiles span nine sectors: government, education, not-for-profit and community services, corporate, utilities and industrial, law enforcement, financial services, aged care, and sport and training. Profiles were dated using a documented calibration method verified against business records. All trend findings were tested like-for-like on a single survey instrument — an earlier pooled analysis across two survey versions was audited, and findings that reflected the instrument change rather than real change were removed. As a practitioner database drawn from organisations investing in team development, it describes the developing Australian workforce rather than a national random sample. A wider database (9,882 adults across two survey versions, plus ~900 youth profiles) supports ongoing research.
Jane Wundersitz is the founder of WunderTraining, Australia’s only VIA Character Strengths Master Trainer, and a 2026 Real Leaders Top Impact Speaker. She has delivered leadership and team development to more than 60,000 people across Australia. Her forthcoming book on culture, connection and character strengths draws on this research. For keynotes, workshops or media enquiries, contact WunderTraining.
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Jane Wundersitz
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