We are very proud to announce that Communicorp UK has been awarded a 2 Star Best Companies Award for ‘Outstanding’ employee engagement.
Culture is something built with and for our people, which for some companies, can take a long time to develop. Being recognised, at just 4 years old, as a company that delivers outstanding workplace engagement is an amazing achievement for all.
The road to 2 stars was paved by a move towards transparency with our People Survey.
Every six months, we give our team the opportunity to have their say in our company and culture. The results tell us exactly how they feel about every aspect of their experience with us and help us prioritise the right improvements based on their feedback. Since we began to measure engagement in 2016 we have achieved personal best results in every survey with engagement soaring as high as 83% and with a 98% participation we know this represents the majority.
To run parallel, our people survey tour created a consistent and transparent process of asking for feedback and immediately sharing the results at team level. The tour is led by myself, alongside Mark Lee, our Chief Executive Officer, where we visit all of our nine locations from Scotland to South Wales presenting the results, generating ideas together and turning those into actions to deliver on over the next six months. Some of the ideas have turned into our best people initiatives and the consistency in our approach has created a real sense of integrity in the survey – one of our company values.
In March 2018, we took a bold step towards our goal and invested in the Best Companies bHeard Survey. In our first attempt, we were accredited with a 2 Star Award for outstanding levels of employee engagement. This is the ultimate recognition and reward for all of us and the journey does not stop here as we get ready to survey again in September.
We’re nowhere near the finished article, but we feel it’s important to share our success stories with other businesses who share our beliefs: that staff engagement with their role, their team, their leaders, their culture and their company should always be a top priority and a crucial part of the People Strategy.
As a results-focused business, we excel in turning feedback into ideas and ideas into action and over the last four years, we have worked hand in hand with our people to develop cultural initiatives and positive practices that have gained their investment and engagement with our company and their role in our shared success.
Our most recent initiative is the launch of Me Space, our employee well-being platform.
You don’t need to go far to hear about the work/life balance. It’s a current and important topic. This was reflected in our People survey which saw the vast majority of respondents reaching out for help in this area. In response, we created a platform to give people instant access to confidential support, guidance and learning about how they can cope better with everyday challenges of work, life, money, health and family.
With the speed life moves at now, it was a platform that we knew needed to be responsive, accessible and flexible.
And that flexibility extended to our individual roles where we developed more options to manage your role and your day in a way that meets your personal needs too.
Our culture has been built upon our Vision, Mission and Values. Our mission is to do ideas, relationships and results better than anyone else. Our expectations of our people are equally ambitious and we help them to create their own set of ambitious goals within their Personal Best plan, always including life goals to create the perfect balance of success. We want them to create unmissable moments for our listeners, transform our customers' businesses and deliver their personal best performance every year.
But how can we create unmissable moments and measurable results if we’re not developing as professionals?
To push our staff to be their very best, we have developed our very own academies on leadership, sales, programming and marketing, creative and digital. Our academy programmes are intended to be transformational in the way that they engage and develop people. All of our content is bespoke to our company and our goal for our people is to be the smartest, boldest and most creative in everything they aspire to do.
Investing in a Learning Management System we called the Learning Hub created an online space for people to take control of their own learning path with us and they have access to a variety of powerful content, resources and flexible tools that will enable them to learn and grow from the moment the join us.
A new initiative in 2017 was a partnership with Nottingham Trent University for their Chartered Management Degree Apprenticeship to offer our future leaders a unique chance to gain a prestigious qualification and fulfil their aspirations to become a great leader later in their careers.
Looking out for up and coming talent in our industry remains a commitment for us as this year we are again supporting the SRA I Love Student Radio Awards to connect us to new talent and provide them with learning opportunities.
One of the most satisfying experiences over the last four years has been to watch new people join and see their reaction when they realise that our values aren’t just words - they’re real.
It is a privilege to work with a company which is genuinely led by its people and for our culture to be recognised in this way is the ultimate reward, and this is just the start.