HRreview Special Edition

Employee Engagement and Rewards 2018

Sponsored by:

Employee Engagem

ent

2018

Denise Willett: Recognition: The Power to Drive Engagement and Business Performance 2

Barry Cullen: How employee engagement improves diversity 4

Karen Plum: Six factors to engage employees in the ever-distracted working world 6

Jo Sellick: Business Leaders must set an example to boost employeeengagement 8

Cathy Brown: Human resources, or human beings? 16

Andrew Hulbert: A case study: Implementing employee engagement strategy to aid start-up 18

Isaac Getz:The French paradox: How France is ‘liberating’ its employees 20

Dawn Sowerby: Want to engage your people? Start with redesigning HR 22

James Walsh: How can employers help their staff to engage in workplace pensions? 24

Cain Ullah: Culture: the key to creating a Best Company to Work for 26

Neil Usher: Engaging the elemental workforce 28

C-J Green: Networking as a form of employee engagement 30

Contents

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Dear Reader,

Our latest special edition examines the issues surrounding employee engagement and rewards.

This edition contains a selection of articles looking at subjects such as: diversity as a part of your engagement strategy; workplace design; recognition and case studies from companies such as the Sellick Partnership and Red Badger.

We are also delighted to be partnering with Achievers and Symposium to bring you this edition.

Readers might like to know Symposium is offering and exclusive HRreview discount for their Employee Engagement and Rewards Summit - see page 10 for details.

The Achievers Employee Engagement Platform combines the highest-adopted employee recognition solution with an active listening interface to accelerate employee engagement.

Learn how your company can change the way the world works at Achievers.com01442 829253

Everyday. Everyone. Everywhere.

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Simplify the experience

Simplicity of the recognition scheme is essential to ensure there are no barriers to recognition. Our mantra is, “Everyday, everywhere, everyone.” Make recognition accessible to all, regardless of job role and location. Put the ability for colleagues to recognise each other into the tools your employees are already using – embed recognition into the flow of work. For example, give employees the ability to launch a recognition from Yammer, Salesforce or Sharepoint. Immediate and frequent recognition is crucial to reinforce and drive positive behaviour and change.

Increase frequency

Annual anything doesn’t work – it doesn’t change behaviour or move the needle. Right now, there is a lot of talk around always-on employee feedback – incidentally, our own Achievers Listen functionality facilitates real-time, personalised feedback and bite-sized actions. Since employee engagement is fluid, taking action on feedback and sending recognition should be an everyday behaviour. Little and often!

Frequency of recognition is directly correlated to increased engagement. But don’t worry - this doesn’t mean a massive increase in reward budget. It is the recognition moments that matter; non-monetary recognition is priceless. Some of our programmes see 84+ recognitions per employee, per year!

In addition to making recognition easy, the key to driving frequency is a solid ongoing communications plan and the ability to identify opportunities for continued improvement.

Achievers doesn’t just toss over the keys; they partner with their customers every step of the way – it is a journey!

Get executives on board

A successful programme encourages the whole business to embrace and own recognition. We know this begins with leadership support. The executive team has to set the agenda for what is important and recognition is no exception. You cannot delegate culture! Leaders must lead by example. Once leaders are onboard, empower your workforce by putting recognition in the hands of everyone.

Link recognition to business objectives and performance

To ensure longevity, the programme success must be measurable and linked to business objectives and performance. Achievers’ clients are seeing outstanding programme results that are directly impacting their bottom-line. Here are just a few examples:

A manufacturing customer leveraged recognition to help increase safe-day record from 363 days to 595 consecutive days - saving $1.8m in safety costs across a 12-month period.

A UK-based online retail business saw a 17-point increase in engagement since rolling out a formal recognition platform and an increase in profit of 43.6%.

A large global services company who, in only 7 weeks, achieved a 14-point increase in new hire retention by using recognition to form part of the onboarding process.

We are seeing a shift and

employees want to take ownership of their own engagement journey. It’s down to us as individuals to be accountable, and what organisations can do is embrace new ways and advanced technology to empower their employees.

Do you want more insights on employee engagement? Follow our award-winning blog, The Engage Blog.

Achievers is a behaviour-driving employee engagement platform that listens to employees and aligns them with business objectives and company values. Our award-winning employee recognition platform and active listening interface with insights enable enterprise organisations to accelerate employee engagement. To learn more, visit www.achievers.com.

The latest report from Gallup states that just 1 in 10 UK and EU workers are actively engaged. With UK productivity seeing further falls during 2017, it is no surprise that the UK Government recognises that the country has an employee productivity problem. The UK’s newly announced Industrial Strategy is based on “Five Foundations of Productivity”, one of these Foundations being ‘People’. For Achievers, an organisation that lives and breathes employee engagement and witnesses the business benefits first-hand behind the power of putting employees first, this is welcome news.

The impact of employee engagement on key business objectives is staggering. According to Gallup, highly engaged business units see:

• a 17 percent increase in productivity• a 24 percent reduction in employee turnover

• a 41 percent reduction in absenteeism

The importance of employee engagement on key business performance metrics cannot be ignored. Today’s employees are looking for a deeper meaning in their jobs, where they can add value and feel connected to the overall vision and purpose of their company. A company’s culture is becoming more important than ever. In a recent global study, Achievers found that 66% of UK respondents cited a positive corporate culture as important or very important in their decision to stay with their current employer. How has company culture changed and what opportunities lie in front of us?

Nowadays, advancements in technology allows everyone to have instant access to information at their fingertips. When job seekers look for

employment they take to the Internet to read all of the good, bad and ugly that is available on social media (i.e. Glassdoor, Facebook, etc.). The power has shifted and continues to shift from the employer to the employee. Because of this ongoing shift, now more than ever, employee recognition is no longer a nice-to-have, but a requirement to maximise business performance. At Achievers we believe, and Havard Business Review agrees, that recognition is the number one trigger to impact employee engagement and, in turn, business performance.

How can you get started and set yourself up for success? Here are some best practice principles for creating a high frequency recognition programme to drive engagement:

Denise currently holds the role of Senior Director, Achievers EMEA, which sees her leading sales, marketing and services.

Denise is passionate about helping our clients build and maintain successful engagement programmes that align with strategic business objectives. Prior to her present position, Denise spent 5 years successfully leading and developing a fantastic team of Customer Success Managers. This gave her the opportunity to partner with many diverse, global organisations who share her belief in the power of a work environment committed to employee recognition and engagement.

Denise Willett

Recognition: The Power to Drive Engagement and Business PerformanceDenise Willett discusses the powerful impact of employee recognition on both engagement and business performance. She also shares top tips for success.

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The value of diversity

RICS recently conducted some research that found only 63 per cent of professionals reported working for an employer with formal hiring policies in place to support diversity. With many industries facing an increasing skills shortage, now more than ever is the time to prioritise the development of a diverse workforce, so companies can tap into a wider pool of talent.

But diversity cannot be embedded without inclusion – creating a culture of openness that helps employees to feel comfortable being themselves at work, and employee engagement is integral to fostering this environment.

Next generation employee engagement

As technology facilitates a more fluid, flexible workplace culture, traditional modes of engaging employees, such as ‘town hall’ style

events, are becoming redundant for some companies. Freelancers often don’t work from a central office, for example, so leaders need to think creatively about how to unite their teams.

The first step is creating an online survey to gather insight into the current engagement levels. Ask questions that reveal specific, relevant data that you can respond to – staff will expect their opinions to be heard and acted upon. The survey should be structured to encourage frank, anonymous feedback, so leaders can identify barriers and issues quickly.

Once you have the data, it’s the responsibility of the leadership to communicate the findings openly, with a clear plan to address any concerns. Diversity remains a challenge for many businesses and questions relevant to this issue may raise some sensitive topics. Authentic communication is key to

building trust between teams and senior management, so be prepared to have some difficult conversations. Live streaming a Q&A with the leadership team, which explores some of the findings of the initial research, ensures all of your employees can be involved, regardless of their location.

The next step is ensuring managers are equipped with the right skills to act as role models and mentors. Commitments to diversity and inclusion cannot be lip service – organisations need to invest in formal training programmes to ensure their employees at manager level are able to embody the values they aim to uphold. Companies should train their managers to take an active role in developing engagement plans with their teams, as well as tracking managers’ performance based on engagement levels.

Barry Cullen is the Diversity and Inclusion Director at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors

Barry Cullen

How employee engagement improves diversityDiversity is a valuable part of any employee engagement programme, and it is important that HR know how to make the two work together. Barry Cullen from RICS discusses more.

Taking the lead

A brilliant example of a company developing a forward thinking employee engagement strategy is building consultancy Arcadis. Alan Brookes, UK CEO, has spearheaded the development of six equality, diversity and inclusion workstreams (Age, Disability, Faith, Gender, LGBT+ and Race) within the organisation. From collating a series of personal stories from an employee representing each of the groups for their website, to assigning role models to help champion individuality, this is a best practice example of employee engagement that can dramatically impact company culture.

Take the story of Bright Ansah. Bright arrived as a new migrant to the UK in 2011, and began working as a security officer at Arcadis. He had hopes of becoming a surveyor one day, but with no financial support, opportunities to further his education, or work experience, were limited. A chance discussion with some of the team at Arcadis gave him an opportunity to showcase his raw talent, and he’s now a Trainee Quantity Surveyor in the business, studying his MSc in Construction Commercial Management at university and enrolled in the APC training. None of this would have been possible without the support of the senior team at Arcadis and their belief in investing in the next generation of

talent.

Putting engagement at the heart of the IEQM

Arcadis is one of the signatories of the RICS Inclusive Employer Quality Mark, developed to drive behaviour change amongst our membership firms. Through the self-assessment tool we’ve developed, businesses are encouraged to bi-annually assess and reflect on their performance against six key principles: leadership and vision; recruitment; staff development; staff retention; staff engagement and continuous improvement. Staff engagement is one of the most important pillars of the IEQM, because diversity will only flourish if employees at all levels are actively involved in developing, delivering and monitoring the diversity and inclusion of their workplace.

Success does not come from silos. Leaders should make engagement goals meaningful in the day-to-day experiences of their employees. Similarly, managers should discuss engagement at weekly meetings, project meetings and one-to-one

meetings, so it becomes part of daily interactions and activities within teams.

Building a team for the future

At RICS, we aim to promote a workplace culture that not only values difference, but actively builds and applies it to drive performance. We know that boosting employee engagement significantly improves the productivity of your workforce. Diverse teams not only have a competitive edge, but they are also more likely to invest their career in an organisation long term - culture, values and leadership tend to encourage employees to stay in an organisation and build future success.

Different backgrounds and experiences bring fresh perspectives on the challenges businesses face every day. The success of a company thus depends on the people who work for it – leaders cannot expect to future-proof their business without ensuring they are building teams that reflect the diversity of the world we live in today.

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With the amount of sur-rounding distractions - mainly due to technology in one way or another - Employers truly have a battle on their hands in terms of keeping em-ployees engaged in their work. Organisations should be considering how to become magnets for the best talent, and once the talent is on-board, find ways to keep them invested, engaged and interested in their work.

According to research carried out by OfficeVibe in 2017, only 13 per cent of employees worldwide actually feel engaged in their work, 41% do not feel they can develop and grow in their organi-sation, and a staggering 51 per cent are actively looking to leave their current jobs. That said, a vast 80 per cent of employees surveyed said they would happily work longer hours if their employer was more em-pathetic towards them, and 70 per cent said they would like to spend more time with their managers. So, what can be done to help improve

this clearly distracted and disrupted relation-ship between employ-ees, employers and the work they carry out? The answer for many is to improve “employee engagement” and I don’t disagree, but people often talk about engage-ment in terms of staff happiness or satisfaction – so firstly I’d like to be clear about what en-gagement means to me, before discussing what can be done to promote and support it.

Forbes describes em-ployee engagement as “the emotional commit-ment the employee has to the organisation and its goals”. So, to help with said engagement, we should be looking to focus in on particu-lar methods of keeping teams motivated and invested in their work and tasks, to even stand a chance at retaining top talent. Advanced Work-place Associates’ (AWA) research has found six main factors which contribute to workplace productivity and effi-ciency, which can help to support the focus of both

employees and employ-ers.

1) Social Cohesion

In other words, when people get on with each other in their teams, with others, and with senior leaders, they feel comfortable in sharing their ideas and knowl-edge. They’re also hap-pier to engage in discus-sion for the greater good and they feel safe in expressing their views, regardless of the sen-iority of their peers or managers. A focus on developing and sustain-ing good relationships (and really knowing each other as people) is key.

2) Perceived supervi-sory support

People need to feel that the person they report to is positively sup-porting them and help-ing them achieve their endeavours; without the pressure of constantly needing to please and impress. This is impor-tant because people tend to recognise the relationship they have with their ‘supervisor’ as

Karen Plum

Six factors to engage employees in the ever-distracted working world

a proxy for their relationship with the organisation. Hence, if their relationship with their supervisor is poor, their view of the organisa-tion will be similarly poor, poten-tially leading to the withholding of discretionary energy – and ultimately to them leaving the organisation.

3) Information sharing

It’s about creating a culture and IT infrastructure for sharing knowledge and treating the whole team and the wider community as a ‘knowledge memory’ so that team members can short circuit the search for the best sources of knowledge and avoid re-inventing the wheel, as it were.

4) Vision and goal clarity

You need your employees to be fo-cusing their energy and efforts on similar goals and achievements, to stand a chance of completing them! Give them freedom to in-novate within agreed boundaries, which will then keep them emo-

Karen Plum is head of research & development at Advanced Workplace Associates

How can we engage employees in the ever-distracted working world? Karen Plum from Advanced Workplace Associates delves into vision and goal clarity, social cohesion, and more.

tionally engaged with the work they do, and understand how it fits into their team’s vision and the organisation’s goals. We all need our work to have meaning.

5) External Communication

People benefit from exposing themselves and their knowledge to the views and experiences of diverse groups of people outside their immediate team and organi-sation. This helps to shape and challenge ideas, and bring back new insights to the organisation to fuel innovation and to maintain their vigour. It also helps stave off “group think”, and encourages people to be open to new ideas.

6) Trust

People need to feel that those around them will act in their best interest, that the knowledge they contribute will be used respon-sibly, and that they can depend on the knowledge, advice, skills and abilities of their colleagues. They need to keep their promises, demonstrate trustworthy behav-

iour and actively manage these trusting relationships to protect them.

The key fact to remember is that employers should aim to create an environment which actively encourages engagement. Set clear goals, keep open communi-cation, recognise and reward your employees’ efforts, be generous with your offerings of knowledge, opportunities and development, and ultimately; nurture your workforce.

I firmly believe that if you look after your employees, they will look after you, and in turn, your business. If you have good rela-tionships with colleagues, with mutual trust, working in an en-vironment where everyone feels supported by those around them, then you stand the best possible chance of attracting and retaining the best talent, and will thus enjoy a mutually beneficial working relationship.

Putting a smile on the face of your employees is important in any organisation

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The cornerstone of any successful business is an engaged workforce and, as competition heightens across all industries, there has never been a greater need for strong employee engagement. Despite this, employee engagement is in decline across the world.

Last year, it was reported in the ‘2017 Trends in Global Employee Engagement Report’ by Aon Hewitt that globally, employee engagement had decreased from 65 percent to 63 percent - worse still, the UK scored below the global average with 58 percent.

Disengaged employees have a direct impact on the success of a business and, ultimately, the bottom line. These team members typically care significantly less about their jobs and the costs associated with employee absence, training to address incompetencies and, in some instances, re-

hiring can be huge.

Leading by example

There is no doubt that engaged employees produce better results, but investing in employee engagement takes much more than issuing an annual survey. Engagement is at the core of everything we do at Sellick Partnership, it is one of our three company values and is embedded in our everyday business operations, both internally and externally.

As well as offering a competitive benefits package, which includes above average basic salaries, generous uncapped commission and 25 days holiday per year, we reward employees by regularly hosting a number of company-wide events, Teambuilding activities, away days and internal competitions to strengthen our culture. We also invest in bespoke

training programmes for our employees and encourage them to progress in their careers, because we believe that employees are more likely to be engaged when they feel they are reaching the right work/life balance, as well as being given opportunities for professional development.

It is a tricky balance to strike, but this approach clearly works. We have a 74 percent employee retention rate, which is higher than average for our industry, and employee satisfaction is at 90 percent. We have also been named on the Great Place to Work® UK list, and featured in the Financial Times FT 1000 list of the 1,000 fastest growing companies in Europe. Additionally, we have achieved Investors in People Silver status and this year we are working towards achieving the Gold accreditation.

Jo Sellick is the Managing Director of professional services recruitment specialist Sellick Partnership. Since forming in 2002, Sellick Partnership has gone from strength-to-strength as one of the most respected specialist recruitment agencies in the UK. In 2017 the business celebrated 15 years since Jo set up the firm with just a laptop and a mobile phone. Now the business employs over 85 staff, has seven offices nationwide and has an annual turnover of over £38 million.

Jo Sellick

Business leaders must set an example to boost employee engagementLeading by example should be a priority for HR managers looking to integrate an employee engagement strategy and give staff a voice. Jo Sellick from Sellick Partnership discusses more.

Change comes from the top

Every business leader has their own views on the best ways to boost employee engagement, but the important thing to remember is that there is no quick fix. Many options come with significant costs but there are certain values and tactics that may help boost employee engagement.

Firstly, employers need to have integrity. A business’ culture is by and large shaped by how leaders conduct themselves and integrity has to come from the top, with senior leadership being the gold standard for what is expected of the rest of the team.

Employees are more engaged when working as part of a team when their superiors are also making active contributions. Leaders must be passionate, demonstrate the company values and have a strong work ethic, otherwise employees cannot be expected to know the standard that is required of them.

Flexibility and diversity are key

Secondly, flexibility is essential in meeting the needs and requirements of a modern workforce. Working in the recruitment industry, you gain a unique understanding of trends across the board – and this is absolutely one of them. Lots of people are talking about the challenges in attracting millennial talent at the moment, but the real challenge lies in engaging them – as well as the wider multi-generational workforce. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, so flexibility is essential.

The companies people want to work for are those who are really thinking outside of the box when it comes to benefits and rewards and if the rest do not follow suit,

they will be left behind.

Employees need to have a degree of choice in creating a professional environment and reward package that suits their individual needs, from flexible start/finish times right through to the way they prefer to communicate their views. Additionally, it is important that employees are consulted before their rewards package is created, to avoid the issue of them having a choice of unsuitable options.

Give staff a voice

Finally, one of the most effective ways of improving employee engagement - in results and cost – is by giving team members a voice, ensuring they are heard, and responding to them. Every employee wants to feel like they are making a contribution and that their views are heard. A great way to encourage this is through employee-led committees or working groups.

We have a number of committees at Sellick Partnership, within which team members have the

opportunity and authority to make business improvements in specific areas such as CSR and rewards and recognition. The group consults their colleagues on issues and changes are communicated business-wide, promoting a ‘you said, we did’ culture. We have never had more diverse groups of people in our workforces, and developing the right framework to engage every individual is by no means an easy task – but that makes it no less essential.

Employee engagement is key to retaining top talent and is much more cost-effective than replacing or re-training disengaged team members. Given the right level of attention, if done well, it has the potential to significantly boost our bottom lines and in turn, the wider economy, making the UK a better place to live and work.

Although more businesses are recognising the true value of the investment, as a whole, we are still a long way from where we need to be if we want to compete with the world’s leading countries.

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March 27 2018 @ InterContinental Hotel London O2

Media Partner:

Conference Preview

Employee Engagement and Reward Summit 2018

Apply nowwww.symposium.co.uk/hr207-hrreview-engagement-applyor call our customer hotline on 020 7231 5100

Key topics for this event:

• What modern engagement strategies should look like

• Who delivers a successful engagement strategy

• The best engagement platforms for maximum effectiveness

• How to remove the ‘process’ from engagement management

• • Panels on engagement and reward support for working parents

and carers

• Do modern workplace practises help or hinder engagement and

satisfaction?

• The role of great managers in creating and driving engagement

• The future trends of engagement and reward: and what you can do

now

As media partners for this event, HRreview have an exclusive offer of 10 complimentary tickets for this event, which must be applied for. Terms and conditions apply.

Exclusive offer

10 complimentary tickets available

The 13th Annual Employee Engagement and Reward Summit will provide an understanding on the latest data, research and thought leadership to help you drive the engagement agenda in your organisation: retaining top talent and increasing business grgrowth from the bottom up.

With industry leading speakers, and must-know thought leadership, this summit has been designed to help organisations of all sizes reevaluate, upscale or design outstanding engagement strategies.

InterContinental Hotel London 02Tuesday 27th March 2018

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND REWARD SUMMIT

12 13

Welcome to the Employee Engagement and Reward summit preview

We’re really excited to be hosting the 13th annual Employee Engagement Forum.

Our speakers will give you the tools to set up and run a successful engagement programme that fits your business needs, as well as show you the impact it will have on your productivity and the positive benefits of offering hands-on experience and career development to young people. The focus of the Summit is to enable a platform to benchmark, discuss and review the challenges and strategies devised to continuously drive employment engagement to develop a productivity, collaborative and resilient workforce.

If you are an in-house HR Professional our event is for you! Our conference will be aimed at HR Manager and Directors in general, Head of HR’s and talent management, L&D Professionals, Recruiters, Graduate and engagement specialists.

09:00 Coffee and Registration

09:30 Chair’s opening remarks

Dr Amy Armstrong, Faculty and Program Director, Hult International Business School

09:45 Linking engagement to productivity: A modern employee engagement strategy

• The modern watercooler: new ways to engage employees

• What are forward thinking companies doing to generate engagement?

• Company loyalty - what does it mean and how does it manifest itself?

Cathy Brown, Executive Director, Engage for Success

10:10 The Bigger Picture: Who delivers a successful Engagement Strategy?

Working across leadership, organisational structures, teams, career mobility, learning and development opportunities, diversity, brand and HR services to ensure engagement that delivers ROI

• Steps to create a destination workplace that attracts top performers

• From board to contractors: taking a holistic and inclusive approach and measuring outcomes in an environment of joint ownership of responsibility and goals

• How to see increased engagement on the balance sheet

Dawn Sowerby, Director of Transformation, Aster Group UK

10:35 Engagement Platforms: From the right objectives to the best results

Looking at the steps from setting engagement objectives, collecting relevant data, creating pathways and deliver results, ensuring your employee needs are met throughout.

• How the right platform criteria enable best outcomes

• Measurements that fits the HR plan and links to overall business strategy

• Creating engagement that delivers the competitive advantage

Roly Walter, Founder, Appraisd

11:00 Questions and discussion with speakers

11:10 Refreshments and networking

11:30 Taking the process out of engagement management: keeping a continuous conversation

• Developing fit for purpose employee engagement via continuous conversation

• In-house tools to assist engagement at no cost• How to enable horizontal and vertical

conversations across the business

Karen Notaro, Head of Engagement Champions Network, Ministry of Justice11:55 Conversation: Focus on Engagement and

Reward support for working parents and carers

A discussion exploring the approaches to engagement and reward with a focus on how companies can support working parents and carers.

Jennifer Liston-Smith, Director, My Family Care

Adam Brooke, Vice President, Benefits Consultant, Bank of America Merrill Lynch

12:20 Questions and discussion with speaker

12:30 Lunch and networking

13:30 Knowledge share networking session Roundtable discussions with your peers to share solutions to your key challenges

Focus: Best-practise to embed employee engagement through communication and understanding

Breakout Session Stream A

14:00 Case Study: Effective reward culture - the power of motivation

• How to implement rewards that matter to employees

• How to ensure long-term incentives• How to measure the effectiveness of employee

rewards

14:25 Telling the story - impact of your organisational narrative

• Shifting accountability for engagement• Creating coherence across workforce and

management levels• Overcoming disengagement by a shared sense of

success

Nina Callard, Head of Internal Engagement, Cancer Research UK

14:50 Questions and discussion with speakers

Breakout Session Stream A

14:00 Do modern workplace practises help or hinder engagement and satisfaction?

Reviewing the link between workplace practises and engagement satisfaction:

• Old vs New, Fixed vs mobile technology, office vs remote working - the pros and cons

• How large and small companies create space for work, recreation and privacy

14:25 The role of a good manager in creating and driving engagement

• Key leadership skills that matter to employees• How an Engagement Leader think and act• How HR can manage disruption caused by

different personalities

Karen Rayfield, Director of People and Performance, Helping Hands

14:50 Questions and discussion with speakers

15:00 Refreshments and networking

15:20 Panel discussion: Main trends in engagement - looking toward the future

• Between evolving work structures, technology, and public policies how do we generate the right models for employment, career development and organizational success.

• Our panel will be discussing the successes and the challenges around understanding and adapting to future trends in the workplace, as well as giving some predictions

Alex Nelson, Employee Engagement Manager, Marks and Spencer Plc

Kate Griffiths-Lambeth, Group Director of HR, Charles Stanley

15:45 Case Study: How to become recognised as a fantastic company to work for• Understanding your workforce via the right EE

surveys and shifting from data to insight• Engaging with the workforce as a whole as well

as groups and sections to create specific and general engagement strategies

• Open up opportunities by using existing talent and identify secondary skills within the workforce

Alex Nelson, Employee Engagement Manager, Marks and Spencer Plc

16:10 Questions and discussion with speakers16:20 Chair’s closing remarks and end of

Conference programme

www.symposium.co.ukEmployee Engagement Summit 2018 Preview

14 15

Apply nowwww.symposium.co.uk/hr207-hrreview-engagement-applyor call our customer hotline on 020 7231 5100

Key topics for this event:

• What modern engagement strategies should look like

• Who delivers a successful engagement strategy

• The best engagement platforms for maximum effectiveness

• How to remove the ‘process’ from engagement management

• • Panels on engagement and reward support for working parents

and carers

• Do modern workplace practises help or hinder engagement and

satisfaction?

• The role of great managers in creating and driving engagement

• The future trends of engagement and reward: and what you can do

now

As media partners for this event, HRreview have an exclusive offer of 10 complimentary tickets for this event, which must be applied for. Terms and conditions apply.

Exclusive offer

10 complimentary tickets available

The 13th Annual Employee Engagement and Reward Summit will provide an understanding on the latest data, research and thought leadership to help you drive the engagement agenda in your organisation: retaining top talent and increasing business grgrowth from the bottom up.

With industry leading speakers, and must-know thought leadership, this summit has been designed to help organisations of all sizes reevaluate, upscale or design outstanding engagement strategies.

InterContinental Hotel London 02Tuesday 27th March 2018

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND REWARD SUMMIT

16 17

Research shows that organisations with high levels of employee engagement are more efficient and effective, and that highly engaged employees:• are more customer focused, find they are more creative at work, and take less time off sick;• care about the future of their organisation and put in greater effort to help it meet its objectives;•feel proud of the organisation they work for and are inspired to do their best and motivated to deliver the organisation’s objectives.

The connection between engagement and productivity has been demonstrated through research, along with the relationship to wellbeing, customer satisfaction and numerous other business metrics.

The world of work is changing fast. Automation is already changing our

workplaces. The UK population is ageing, with fewer young people coming into the job market, educational standards rising in India and the Far East, and innovation thriving around the Pacific Rim. UK productivity has stagnated since 2008/9 and remains about 15% below historical trends, and UK GDP per hour is around 17% below the G7 average. In the 21st Century, the UK’s best assets are our people and our ability to enable them to innovate.

Organisations embedding the enablers of employee engagement as the way they work have more chance of surviving in the new global economy, because they are building the future with, and around, their people.

So, we generally know and accept the evidence that creating an engaging workplace culture is a ‘good’ thing. But the sticking point is often what to do about that! How do we

even get started? As irrational human beings, rather than emotionless Human Resources, we actually don’t tend to react very well to ‘engagement initiatives’ or ‘transformation programmes’ - they can have the unintended impact of actually disengaging us!

So, engagement by stealth? Is that even a thing?

Some of the most successful organisations look at engagement in a very different way. Not as something that we do to people, something we impose in the form of a programme or campaign, with targets and measures. They look at it as a holistic way of working - ‘this is simply how we do things around here. Every day.”

Those organisations tend to have a very clear vision and aspiration, one that everyone in the organisation can connect to on an emotional level. We are increasingly looking for purpose in

Cathy has wide ranging experience across the public, private and third sectors in raising awareness and providing practical guidance to organisations looking to improve employee engagement. With a background in delivering strategic transformation programmes for a FTSE 100 company, she recognises the importance of values, good management, authentic leadership and the ability to listen in creating environments where people can bring the best of themselves to work every day.

Cathy Brown

Human Resources, or Human Beings?

Cathy Brown, Director at Engage for Success, discusses the role of Human Resources in employee engagement.

our work, and this is where we find it. Unilever for example have taken a very different approach to this recently, make the opportunity available to many of their staff to dig deeper into their own purpose and values, and then working with their people to find opportunities and development that really work for both sides.

Successful, sustainable organisations also develop and train their managers well. They promote an atmosphere of trust, and discourage micromanagement. Managers have the skills, confidence, self awareness and resilience to treat people as individuals and deal with a complete spectrum of behaviours, goals and conversations. Research to be released this year by Engage for Success and Ashridge Executive Education at Hult International Business School explores

the area of team dynamics more closely and highlights the importance of the team relationships in supporting positive behaviours.

Trust in the organisation is a characteristic of highly engaged, highly performing organisations too. The awareness that values are understood and lived, and that behaviour is consistent with those values is vital to organisational success. The case studies from the UK Public Sector featured in our recent paper: Outcomes Through Engagement: How the Public Sector Improves Citizen Outcomes Through Employee Engagement demonstrate this really clearly, with Glenn Tunstall of Kingston Metropolitan Police citing it as the very first aspect he tackled when the force started it’s journey to become the most engaged borough in the Met Police.

Finally, listening (and acting on) what people have to say is a key differentiator between organisations that do this well, and ones that don’t. We are very used to being asked our view these days, for any product or service we buy and many things that we experience. Our views are sought and welcomed. Work is no different!

All of these aspects involve the employees as an intrinsic part of the solution, not as something to be fixed or got around. As humans, rather than Human Resources. So, embedding engaging principles into everything you do as an organisation is the way to go, rather than the transactional activity of ‘let’s run an engagement programme’- after all, would you rather be doing, or be done to?

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In August 2014, aged 27, I left my job of six years and set up a new facilities services provider. I’d become disillusioned with the failures of the larger service providers within the property services sector, and felt that there must be a better way. I had a vision of a facilities services provider that would thrive within the property services sector. The growth story of Pareto FM acts a case study for how employee engagement strategy can aid business growth and create competitive advantage.

The basic principle idea was to start a ‘great’ organisation. An organisation which would simultaneously be enjoyable to work at and have exceptionally high expectations of its teams. The key for this would be a high employee engagement strategy. Ultimately, the aim of this strategy was to differentiate Pareto by offering a working

environment to teams which could not be found elsewhere. This would enable us to attract great talent, retain it and deliver unrivalled levels of service to our clients. We’d give our team members the processes, flexibility and working culture they’d always wanted to enable them to deliver on their terms. I held the fundamental belief that team members are the most important aspect of any business and if we looked after them well, they in turn would look after our clients well. Three years on, and as Pareto has matured, our high employee engagement strategy has formed our business culture. We call this Pareto Personality. Pareto Personality is about working extremely hard to deliver exceptional customer service to our clients, but enjoying a work environment completely tailored to the needs of the team members. Our employee engagement strategy is based on

the concept of doing all we can to enhance the working lives of our teams and ensuring we give them all the tools needed so they as individuals can operate most effectively.

We’ve achieved this in a number of ways:

• Processes – Finance, HR, Helpdesk, Purchasing processes can be tailored to the team’s needs. Removing all unnecessary bureaucracy and administrative burden.

• Training - All team members are offered external tailored training at no cost to themselves. We offer management courses to all operative level team members who wish to move their careers forward. We’ve even funded non-facilities related training for those wish to progress to a different career.

• Mentoring & Coaching - Our management team all go through Insights

Andrew Hulbert is founder and Managing Director of Pareto Facilities Management. Pareto FM is a leading facilities services provider within the property sector.

Andrew Hulbert A Case Study: Implementing an employee engagement strategy to aid start-up Andrew Hulbert from Pareto Facilities Management discusses how his company has achieved an effective and successful employee engagement strategy using ‘Pareto personality’.

Discovery full psychological profiling and follow up training. This enables our teams to develop their emotional intelligence in relation to themselves and others. We also offer free external business coaching to all levels of the business.

• Recognition - Within our online HR software, we have a public recognition page. Any time we receive any positive feedback, it goes on to this public board. Teams can also award badges to each other. These badges then lead to £50 vouchers.

• Food - Our management team provide chocolates, cakes, fruit and treats for our teams during their site visits building an emotional food-based connection. • Fair Pay – Pareto has operated as a Living Wage provider since inception.

• Interest free loans – Pareto provide standard travel loans but also extend to personal issues such as visa expiry, purchasing new cars and even helping to fund IVF.

• Charity support – Pareto now supports five charities annually, four of which are due to team members requesting funds to aid the causes they personally support.

• Access to the Board - Pareto operates a non-hierarchical structure ensuring that anyone can communicate with the board. All team members have at least monthly access to the Managing Director, most have weekly.

• Social Media – We use Twitter to demonstrate our Pareto Personality and attract new talent to our business. See @ParetoFM and #LoveWhatWeDo

For Pareto, this high engagement strategy has aided our start up success. After three years we have a turnover in excess of £8.5m, with over 80 team members that operate across three countries and serve some of the most exciting workspaces in the world. We have exceptionally high staff and client retention, and are beginning to dislodge some of the most established service providers in the sector. For the leaders of Pareto, we’re only just getting started. Our challenge is to continue to develop the culture as the business grows, which will continue to deliver this high employee engagement strategy. Ultimately, we believe, our employee engagement strategy is differentiating Pareto in this sector and delivering competitive advantage.

The training events on this website are led by skilled tutors and experts. Events are highly interactive and focus on practical skills, technical knowledge, and where required, offer some theoretical background.

10th May 2018 @ 9:00am - 4:00pmJumeirah Lowndes Hotel, London

Recruiting from overseas can solve many problems for organisations - but also create new ones. Obtaining work permits for your employees, checking they have a legal right to work, dealing with changing regulations, particularly as Brexit draws nearer: how can you stay up to date?

This This workshop is designed to give you the essential, up to date information about the current workings of immigration rules and will help keep your company compliant.

Trainer: Ian Westwood, previously Chief

Immigration Officer for the Home Office

Immigration for Recruiters:Right to work in the UKTraining Seminar

Book your place at www.symposium.co.uk/event/immigration-for-recruiters-right-to-work-in-the-uk-7

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France is all about Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

That said, two French economists Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc called their famous book about France: La Société de Défiance, in English “the mistrust society”. Based on numerous studies they have shown that France is one of the lowest trust countries in the developed world (the Scandinavians are usually at the top).

So if Fraternité takes a big blow here, perhaps Liberté can carry the day?

Sure, even in our terrorism-prone times, one can walk on every sidewalk in France but one (the Palais de l’Élysée, the French hybrid between 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace). More, one can trade jokes with policemen.That said, the freedom in the daily French lives, halts at the gates of the corporate world.

Its most important freedom—that of employee initiative—is stifled.

France – 6% of engaged employees

The reader might say “but it’s the same all over the world: surely hierarchy and bureaucracy are built for control not for freedom of initiative?” According to Gallup’s 2017 employee engagement survey, in Western Europe, France has 6% of engaged employees, occupying—with Spain and Italy—the very bottom.

Gallup’s numerous studies have shown that employee engagement is highly correlated with employee willingness to express their creative ideas and to take initiative. Put differently, though employees in France are encouraged theoretically to take initiative on behalf of their companies, in practice, they are not

doing it.

I can’t resist to tell this joke about a conversation between an English and a French diplomat. The Englishman says: “We have tried a new approach, and it’s wonderful, it works in practice”. To which the Frenchman replies (do it with a French accent): “Yes, but does it work in theory?”

So, in practice the workplace in France is not very favourable to freedom of initiative and that— paradoxically—is the key for the corporate liberation revolution taking place in this country.

What is corporate liberation?

Corporate liberation means transforming a company’s organisation to allow employee freedom and responsibility to take any action they—not their superiors or

Isaac Getz is Professor at ESCP Europe Business School, public speaker and co-author of the award-winning book “Freedom, Inc.”

Isaac Getz

The French paradox: How France is ‘liberating’ its employeesWithin a liberated company, employees enjoy freedom to take any action that they—not their supervisors or procedures —decide are the best for the company’s vision. Professor Isaac Getz discusses freedom and leadership at work.

procedures—decide as the best for their company’s vision.

For our book Freedom, Inc. Brian Carney and I have studied several dozen such transformations in five countries. Yet, since our book has been translated in French in 2012, something started to happen in this country which hasn’t happened in the Anglo-Saxon countries or even Sweden where the book has appeared in 2011.

Dozens, and then, hundreds of French-based companies started their liberation. Most are SMEs, but corporate liberation occurs also in multinationals such as Airbus, Decathlon and Michelin, a European apparel leader Kiabi, a big insurer MAIF. More, unbelievably, French administration—Social security, of public housing, municipalities—joined the movement.

Meeting fundamental human needs

My way to explain this French paradox is through food (it’s France after all). Imagine, that your company’s cafeteria serves tasty and affordable lunch. If a small eatery offering great inexpensive food opens nearby, you won’t necessarily try it. But, imagine that your cafeteria is just awful. There is a strong chance, you will try—even run to—this eatery.

Paradoxically then, French organisations resemble bad cafeterias and hence, French CEOs and HR professionals increasingly try a radically different, liberated workplace. Some companies in Gallup’s pool have 70% engagement level. The engagement level of liberated companies is similar. Indeed, the liberated workplace is built to meet the fundamental

human needs of intrinsic equality, self-realisation and self-direction. Employees who can satisfy these needs are self-motivated and engaged. Every morning they go to work not because they must but want to, and once there they do their best every day. No wonder these companies—but also public services—largely outperform their counterparts.

Lessons for HR

Liberated companies hold important lessons for HR because they transform many HR processes. They do that not because of some theory, but because self-directing teams ask for it, in practice.

For example, teams may ask to set their own work schedules, their vacations, have a final say on the team-member recruitment, decide on their training needs and perhaps source the training provider.

Even Comp & Ben is revisited. Salaries are fixed in the third quartile of the job market—neither below, in order to retain good professionals, nor above, in order to avoid mercenaries and divas.

Performance-based bonuses are avoided since mistrustful of employee’s ability to repeat the feat next year. Instead, the increase in salary is practiced—the sign of trust in person’s ability to continue being a high contributor.

Finally, a gain sharing scheme kicks in if enough profits are made. In most of the liberated companies, the same sum is given to every employee. In one French liberated company, a European leader in auto-parts, for a frontline employee it amounted usually to 3 additional months of salary annually, and in good years

to 5-6 additional months.

The UK and corporate liberation

There are liberated companies in UK but few—as was the case everywhere else, including France, between 1960 and 2010. However France is changing through corporate liberation, so surely there is hope for the UK too?

Using again the food metaphor, French companies and public services have decided to radically improve the lunch they offer to their employees. Belgian and Swiss companies are joining corporate liberation too.

So are UK businesses and public services so illustrious that they can continue absorb the tremendous human cost of lost initiative and potential of their employees?

The collateral damage of the actively disengaged employees is estimated by Gallup to cost the UK 84.3 to 87.2 billion GBP each year in lost productivity. More, according to research, between 75% and 90% of visits to general practitioner—be it back or shoulder problems, skin eczema, insomnia or depression—are somatisations of work stress, of which the n°1 cause is the lack of control over one’s task.

So wouldn’t it be fun to join the corporate liberation movement and see employees smile and engaged every day, and the UK economy prospering? HR teams can travel with CEOs on this journey—not just in theory but in practice too.

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Warning: tough message follows…HR is no longer relevant. Don’t kill me. I love our profession, it has given me a good career and I have worked with some amazingly talented people over the years. But it is time for a new revolution. Within Aster Group, our HR function had become very regimented and although we had our fair share of talent and were delivering a consistent service to business colleagues, we were focused more on following process than on serving our workforce. We had to acknowledge that our efforts were falling short when it came to driving engagement. So it was time for something new.

Aster is a successful organisation. Though our history is rooted in the public sector we are now a thriving commercial entity with c£200m annual turnover, assets of c£1.5bn and a workforce of 1400 colleagues. Our CEO Bjorn Howard

is unapologetic about Aster’s drive for profit because all of that profit goes back into efforts to solve the UK housing crisis.

So we could be forgiven for asking the question, if our organisation is so successful, why the need to change al all? Well, like most businesses today we face an uncertain future and a rapidly changing context, so whilst we are thriving now, what we do delivers a real social benefit and we want to ensure that we can deliver that in a sustainable way in to the future. Crucial to that ambition is our ability to inspire and engage our colleagues.

How many times as an HR professional have you seen an engagement action plan, or even developed one yourself and thought ‘yep, we’ve cracked it?’ That satisfying feeling when you’ve had the opportunity to get everything you know about how to engage

people down on to a bit of paper that has actually made it as far as the exec suite – it feels good doesn’t it? We’re at the table and finally everyone is taking it seriously,or are they?

Well to be fair, everyone around the table probably is taking it seriously. However, a small but critical point that tends to get overlooked is that engagement isn’t a thing, a ‘product’ if you will and therefore doesn’t lend itself to a transactional action plan. Let’s face it, if it was as simple as planning to do 10 more of X, moving 15 Ys and, I know, whilst we are at it why don’t we create 20 Zs, well we would have all cracked engagement a long time ago. But engagement isn’t a ‘thing’, it’s a way of being and so trying to increase it by using the same tactics as we would for increasing production simply isn’t going to work. It would be the same as using

Dawn is Transformation Director – People at Aster Group and is a Fellow of the CIPD. She has a long track record in HR & OD leadership, having worked across various sectors and operated at director level for seven years.

Dawn Sowerby

Want to engage your people? Start with redesigning HR

a vegetable peeler on a grape – useless.

Should we really be surprised then when our beautiful action plan has enabled little, if any, traction in increasing levels of colleague engagement? Think of that uncomfortable moment when your survey results 12 months later show a smidgen of an increase and you are desperately trying to pin it down to one of the very many actions that were on your original plan. I’m afraid it’s time for a reality check – your action plan hasn’t increased engagement levels. Sorry guys, but it’s true. If you have seen any increase, it is probably incidental to other changes, for example a couple of new managers and is unlikely to be a sustainable increase.

So if engagement is a way of being and we can’t ‘action plan’ our way through it, how is redesigning the HR team going to help? Well it isn’t the full answer I grant you, but I do think it’s an important starting point and can set the context for a very different way of working.

In Aster we recognised that we needed to find a better way – a new way – and one that was deliberately designed to support increasing levels of engagement. So we asked some challenging questions. Does it really take a qualification in HR to drive a great employee experience? We didn’t think so. Is the biggest people risk being taken to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal? Instead we concluded

that the biggest risks are actually around having the wrong people in roles (or the right people in the wrong roles) and having a disengaged workforce.

This is where the redesign comes in. We pulled together IT, Communications, Research, Project and HR teams in to a single directorate and then challenged ourselves not to end up with the same old professional silos in the new team. We knew that if we created the right conditions to enable our colleagues to be the very best that they could be, we could change how work felt not just within our own teams, but across the wider business.

We then shared our idea of workstreams. These would be self-managing, cross-functional teams, with a range of experience and skills, focused on specific value streams: talent; employee experience; learning; research & innovation and projects. We even dared to ask people to choose what they wanted to work on!!! We trust them to use their judgement and discretion in testing new ideas!

It’s early days, but all teams are up and running. There are still core teams in all professional areas to take care of the day to day contractual, compliance

based and reactive activity, but these are now smaller teams with a clear customer focus and again working to self-managing team principles.

Have we got it right? We think so, but time will tell. It was time to try something new and the early signs are good, with some previous HR colleagues telling us how great it is not to have to jump through five hoops just to get something done. One person told me ‘I got the Monday morning feeling and then realised that I didn’t have to anymore – work is good again’. It’s a journey, with some people jumping on to the front of the bus straight away shouting ‘woohoo’ and others cautiously sitting near to the back, believing they are on the right bus but still a little uncertain. That’s ok too, because we all move at different paces.

Dawn Sowerby, Transformation Director at the Aster Group, will be discussing successful engagement strategies at Symposiums leading engagement conference in March. Here she discusses the link between HR and engagement.

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Staff engagement in workplace pensions is generally low for a number of reasons. People might feel disconnected from their pension savings. This is compounded by poor financial literacy and a lack of understanding of the benefits of saving for retirement. But there are a number of ways the HR team can help ensure that a saver who does not want to make active choices about their pension savings, either while working or as they reach retirement, still gets a good outcome.

Know your employees

I don’t know who it was, but whoever said “The basic building block of good communications is the feeling that every human being is unique and of value” was spot-on. As an employer, not only are you often responsible for at least part of their financial wellbeing but you understand how they prefer to be

communicated with and can build this into your benefit strategies. The Pension Quality Mark’s Good Communications Guide has a chapter dedicated to practical advice and tips on how to better understand your employees, including segmentation and member profiling.

HR professionals can also offer staff opportunities to tailor their pension saving to suit their own circumstances and preferences where they wish to do so. The Pensions Policy Institute has argued there are points in time – ‘teachable moments’ – when people are most likely to engage with information and open to behavioural change. These can be anything from leaving full time education, to buying a home, or going through to divorce. These teachable moments can be good opportunities to nudge people towards relevant information about their

workplace pension. HR professionals should consider identifying the most appropriate teachable moments for their workforce – not necessarily when they first start their employment – and planning their engagement strategy accordingly.

As the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) argues in its recent Hitting the Target consultation, good engagement is not a one-off special event. HR professionals should use regular engagement to build their workforce’s familiarity with – and understanding of – pension saving over time.

Saving for retirement

People find it difficult to take long-term decisions. Behavioural factors, such as an inbuilt inclination to value today over tomorrow, play a part in

James Walsh is Policy Lead of Engagement, EU and Regulation at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA).

James Walsh

How can employers help their staff to engage in workplace pensions?Pensions have always been an integral part of employee engagement programmes. James Walsh from the PLSA discusses how HR can help to engage their staff in workplace pensions.

this. So does financial capability, because while people are often good at financial tasks they perform frequently, they often struggle with tasks that they perform less frequently or which are complicated. These factors result in a natural disengagement from retirement saving and many people simply won’t take active decisions while they are working and saving.

HR professionals can make a real difference by explaining the benefit of automatic enrolment, reassuring employees their workplace pension scheme is being well run and helping those who do not take active decisions to achieve a good outcome.

Reaching retirement

Since 2015 people have had more freedom and choice in what they do with their retirement savings. This is good news for savers but also presents important – and sometimes overwhelming – choices to make at retirement for staff members who have been saving into the workplace pension scheme. In an ideal world, people would either decide for themselves what to do with their pension savings or be guided towards appropriate, pre-selected solutions. In either case, good engagement is crucial to ensure they achieve the best possible income in retirement.

Automatic enrolment

Automatic enrolment has made great headway in reversing the decline in UK workplace pension savings. Today, around 9.3 million people have been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension.

Automatic enrolment is based on inertia, the idea that people will take the line of least resistance

when presented with a choice. By reversing the decision to opt-in to a pension scheme to one where people have to choose to opt out, automatic enrolment has ensured that around 90 per cent of those enrolled have chosen to keep saving. So if that’s the case, what role should HR professionals be playing?

While – under this new approach – people are likely to be paying into a pension, they may well not understand the benefits they are receiving or have queries about what some pensions jargon means. HR professionals are ideally placed to help them navigate these issues and if they are unable to provide the information needed, to highlight how they might access this.

Next month (6th April 2018) employers and pension savers will see the first increase of minimum contributions under automatic enrolment – from 2%

of qualifying earnings to 5%. And this will increase again in April 2019 to 8% of qualifying earnings. Some people and employers are already making these higher contributions with figures from the recent AE Review suggesting that in 2016, over half (5.3 million) were receiving an employer contribution of 4% or above. However, HR professionals need to be ready to answer any questions in a neutral and factual manner, so that people understand that saving £50 – for example – out of their monthly pay packet can deliver significant long-term benefits.

HR professionals have a significant role to play in engaging with employees and ensuring that they understand and value their pension benefits. Good luck!

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Talent in the tech industry In the tech industry, there are thousands of companies in London alone; tier one management companies, cash-rich VC-backed product companies, household names like Facebook and Google, and finally, the thousands of competing companies to Red Badger. With all of these companies vying for the same talent, it can make finding the right people extremely difficult.

Attracting talent through culture The way we find the best talent is to focus on building a strong ideology, philosophy, culture and environment that our employees are going to love working in. Our ideology revolves around being an incubator for enriching people’s lives. We want our employees to know

that we’re invested in their future, that we’re focused on their career, and we’re creating a place where they’re going to maximise their future potential. We want to foster entrepreneurship and be a place where amazing things are born.Our culture is about doing the right thing, and doing the thing right. It’s not money-focused, and it’s never about cutting corners. Instead, it’s always about focusing on quality. Through this, we have built a team filled with the best talent in London, that innovate alongside our clients. While building a great culture takes a huge number of variables, the one thing we always do is show our employees we’ve listened to their feedback. As a result we’ve built and continue to evolve Red Badger based on their feedback which we believe is contributing to a happy and productive team which in turn drive our business growth.

Build a company for the employees by listening to the employees If you want to build a culture where your employees thrive, then they need to be involved in the creation process. We have a company day each summer, where all of us go abroad to be somewhere completely disassociated with day-to-day work. There, we run a series of workshops to help make Red Badger better over the next 12 months. In 2016, we looked at our culture and how we could build out our vision, purpose and aspirational principles. All of our employees were involved in setting these values, giving them something that they could believe in and enjoy.

The outcomes of this vision and purpose workshop became the foundation for the following months, as we worked on building out our new brand and

Cain Ullah, co-founder and CEO of Red Badger

Cain Ullah Culture: the key to creating a Best Company to Work For

Red Badger kicked off 2018 by becoming a Sunday Times Best Small Company to Work For. Cain Ullah discusses how building a company culture by listening to employees is the key to attracting and retaining the best talent in an incredibly competitive industry.

launching it in 2017 - including our new vision, purpose and guiding principles. We needed to make sure that these weren’t just put up on the website and then left ignored; they needed to be lived and breathed. Since then, we’ve built interactive workshops for existing staff and a new induction process for new staff. We empower our leaders to ensure that the new principles are communicated properly and we recognise those who embrace them, accordingly.

Autonomy and learning at the heart of culture We’re very much a people-focused company and we put a lot of effort into ensuring that our people are happy. Our employees have a love for autonomy and learning, and so, we have built a culture that has this at its heart. We have an environment that is conducive to learning but also enriches their lives, helping their future careers beyond Red Badger. Alongside a £2,000 annual training budget, employees run regular workshops themselves to teach one another important skills that they might be missing. A great example of this is the Red Badger Design School, which many of our software engineers, project managers and other disciplines have attended and graduated from. This self-learning goes hand-in-hand with autonomy; both of which are integral to our culture. When we asked our employees what they loved most about their role, our Product Designer, Jun

Taoka, summed it up when he said, ‘you’re given autonomy to make the best decisions’. We work hard to find people that we trust to give autonomy to and then we let them get on with it.

Providing perks that echo your culture and values The Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For data found that: • 94% of staff at Red Badger

agreed ‘this job is good for my personal growth’

• 94% of staff at Red Badger agreed ‘my team is fun to work with’

• 98% of staff at Red Badger agreed ‘my organisation encourages charitable donations’

Another way that we’ve achieved these results is because we align our perks and benefits with our culture. It’s no good providing a set of perks and benefits that aren’t aligned to what you’re preaching to your employees. It’s also no good providing perks that no one uses, so you’ve got to make sure you’re listening to what people actually want. Alongside more standardised benefits such as private medical insurance, generous pensions, life insurance and critical illness cover, we offer each employee an annual training budget of £2,000, previously mentioned. This can be spent on what they like, with a caveat that it’s to be used for self-improvement. We’ve had employees use it for everything from attending SXSW and studying creative writing

to learning typography and improving presentation skills. We also make sure that our employees know that their workspace is their space and it’s frequently used outside of office hours from film screenings and Meetups, to personal projects and pro-bono social value projects, such as our app build for Pride of London. Social budget is used for initiatives chosen by our staff - from trampolining trips and paying for a Dodgeball league to Karaoke and team away days. As long as we’re bringing our employees together, we are open to all suggestions. Our charity initiatives are also chosen by our employees. In recent years, our employees have led projects where we’ve volunteered at coding schools for refugees, and backed causes such as the Pinpoint Pathways Mentoring Scheme. Last year, we received the platinum level award (the highest available for companies that have 20%+ employees donating) for the Give As You Earn scheme (GAYE) scheme.

Conclusion Since founding Red Badger in 2010 and growing the company from three people to 100, we’ve found that if you listen to your employees and colleagues and create a place that they’ll love to work in, you’ll be rewarded with an engaged workforce who are talented and invested in what they do. As we continue our fast growth, we hope to scale this culture and continue to be a Best Company to Work For.

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Human Resources is undergoing its own workplace transformation. For many years having been represented as occupants, with possibly a role in an overall governance group determining the future workplace at most, it is now increasingly finding itself not just involved in but leading a transformational project, the principle proponent of the benefit.

As the importance of the workplace – as an attractor and retainer of talent, and a means to engagement, productivity and innovation – has grown, so the natural linkage with the profession of people has created a relationship that by rights should have always existed. That there has been such a gulf between the HR and Property function in most organisations for so long is something of a mystery. Much of the recent change relates to the gradual emergence

of ‘Workplace’ as a discipline in its own right – a composite of HR, Architecture and Design, Property, Facilities Management, IT, Communications, Legal and Finance – struggling for its own identity amid the emergence of the importance of the physical environment. Yet for the HR leader, a fantastic workplace is a gift, an enabling, motivating tool of its trade.

Why do we need a fantastic workplace? There has been something of a revival of the productivity argument in recent years, considered to be a route to the Board for investment. Yet in an age where values are becoming increasingly recognised as something – in the words of the author Alan Williams – “to be lived not laminated”, there is a far broader argument for the organisation that seeks purpose with performance. Neil Usher offers a six-point

model for making the case in his new book The Elemental Workplace – as useful an introduction to the subject for HR professionals as you will find.

The six e’s give us: efficiency in the form of responsible cost and spatial metrics, respecting the commercial considerations; the effectiveness to ensure that everything needed is provided and works, and people can be at their best every day; the expression of the organisation’s DNA through its workplace creating advocacy and commitment; a focus on the environment such that we leave as light a footprint on the planet as possible; the digital representation of the organisation and its workplace in the ether, where in an age of instant accountability demonstrably living its values becomes essential; and an energy for our people, a deeper and more

Neil Usher is executive Consultant, Unispace and workessence.

Neil has 25 years global award-winning experience in leading property, workplace and change for a host of major organisations in various sectors, including the creation of the much-lauded Sky Central workplace in West London. He recently completed his first book The Elemental Workplace, published by LID on 1 March.

Neil Usher

Engaging the elemental workplace

The importance of the workplace as a means to engagement has grown in recent years. But how do we go about creating a fantastic workplace? Neil Usher discusses.

comprehensive idea of wellbeing. The six e’s create the compelling vision, the ‘why’, encompassing both data and conviction. They are also capable of flexing to reflect the relative importance of each in the organisation to which they are applied, and that may change over time as the organisation grows and matures.

How do we go about creating a fantastic workplace? While we are primarily interested here in the physical workplace, we also need to be cognisant of the digital workplace – the social connections between people – and how this complements the physical to create a social workplace. This enables us to understand some key principles of change: being a fantastic neighbour while adopting a community spirit and mindset, mobilising advocates at all levels of the organisation, and focussing on creating the time and space to allow people to adapt to their new workplace rather than being forced to adopt new behaviours at a particular point in time. The Elemental Workplace also directs us to a number of other key considerations of ‘how’ – a set of universal design principles that govern any approach to this phase of activity, a recognition of the complex array of forces working for and against us in this pursuit – and a re-appraisal of the creation of a quality service provision

based on a colleague as opposed to a customer mindset. In many respects these considerations challenge established practices, but they present a tried, tested and compelling logic.

So, what does a fantastic workplace look like? It can be created by focussing the design and construction on 12 key elements – daylight, connectivity, space, choice, influence, control, refresh, sense, comfort, inclusion, wash and storage. The approach does not prescribe an aesthetic, there is still a key role for design and specification, yet it helps focus on what it important. The periodic table in which the 12 elements are framed recognises that all organisations will need to focus on different areas, and so it is free of hierarchy or order – just as long as each is considered and responded to. The approach has been tested over time in a number of participative sessions with HR leaders and the same elements were consistently identified. As the approach is simple and

accessible, it makes possible a self-assessment tool that can be performed quickly and easily with no particular specialist knowledge, by anyone within an organisation at any time – no army of expensive assessors needed. It creates a ‘Standard’, but rather than an elite mark, it is one that it is deemed everyone can aspire to and achieve, in which the highest mark becomes the expected norm. This sets it apart from most (if not all) workplace accreditations. The ultimate goal is that the Standard is no longer needed, having served its purpose and happily worked itself into obsolescence. It is possible for everyone to have a fantastic workplace. HR can play a leading role in the increased awareness of the contribution it is able to make – and help make the case and shape the outcome.

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C-J Green

Networking as a form of employee engagement

Networking is an impor-tant port of business; According to a survey by Performance-based Hir-ing, 85 per cent of jobs are filled through net-working and nearly 100 per cent of people agree that face-to-face meet-ings are essential for long-term business rela-tionships. So how should we navigate networking events to see them as dynamic forms of em-ployee engagement?

Mandatory socialising will never match volun-tary interactions when it comes to employee engagment for forging fruitful business connec-tions and interpersonal relationships. This is how we should all look at networking events - to make the most of out of them, you need to be en-gaged and enthusiastic – you should want to be there, interested to meet people, and get talk-ing. We make the best impressions with a smile and a positive outlook, the kind that comes from someone who feels empowered about their presence at a network-ing event.

It’s important to change the way people think about attending net-working events. These are the places where valuable industry insight is shared and can be an unparalleled source of ideas and perspectives. The best way to encour-age people to want to attend networking op-portunities is by making sure they understand the benefits. In these spac-es, you’ll learn about others but you’ll also learn about yourself. When we introduce our-selves we naturally want to come off well, and we tend to explain our role within the company positively – this can go a long way to reinforc-ing a positive attitude about the work you do. Most importantly, you’ll discover what others know about your own business, which could have a positive impact on their attitude toward their own job, so they re-turn to work the next day refreshed and excited with new ideas and an increased perspective.

In our experience, the way to get people en-

gaged isn’t through dictating a list of manda-tory tasks. We’ve spent a lot of time creating an ethos which ensures this doesn’t happen at Servest. We are people-focused, we provide choice and allow people to determine their own style of working; which is crucial to them feeling engaged and in control of their careers. I think networking is no differ-ent; it’s an extension of their role at work and shouldn’t force anyone to act out of character. We allow everyone to decide for themselves about which events to attend by evaluating what each one offers on a situational basis.

Another reason we don’t insist that everyone at-tends certain events, is because we recognise the diverse personalities within our team. Events work best when people are engaged and use the opportunities well – but they have to want to be there. Making the most of said events means being engaged and en-thusiastic, and if they’re not, it may reflect poorly

C-J Green is Group HR Director for Servest Group, a leading facilities management provider employing more than 20,000 people over 7,500 sites across the UK

on them (as well as the business). If a colleague does want to chal-lenge themselves and represent the company at an event, they should certainly have access to support from their manager to make sure they make a good impression.

From my own perspective, I encourage colleagues to attend networking events where pos-sible for numerous reasons. It’s a great way to build confidence, in yourself as well as the com-pany you’re representing. And you’ll often find a circulation of valuable knowledge and industry insight – if it’s being spoken about

at a networking event, it’s usu-ally an important aspect of your industry and you might pick up a thing or two that could benefit your personal development also. This is then a great opportunity to gauge your own approaches and evaluate your place in the market. With this in mind, Servest offers coached sessions on how to net-work. This training isn’t forced on anyone, but it’s available for those who want to learn more.

The business opportunities of socialising shouldn’t be under-estimated, having your company represented accurately and pas-sionately infront of a professional

audience is a great opportunity for growing your talent base and showing your organisation’s place in the industry. Colleagues who attend social events are your ad-vocates and ambassadors of your business, so its important that they feel confident. It’s no secret that some people find networking a daunting aspect of their job; but with the right support, socialising and networking can be a formi-dable form of employee engage-ment, leaving your employees with a refreshed outlook and deeper knowledge of the industry.

C-J Green believes it is important to change the way people think about attending networking events. Here she discusses the ben-efits of social interaction in a working environment.

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