We recently guest-hosted a very special edition of the HR Grapevine podcast to celebrate great workplace cultures from some of the 2024 UK's Best Workplaces™.
Episode 1: The Best Workplaces Awards
We're excited to share our first installment of a special 3-part podcast series on the HR Grapevine Podcast.
In this episode, Abigail Yeboah, our Senior List & Organisational Trends Manager, is joined by:
- Lisa Shaftesley, HR Director at Booking.com,
- Matt Wintle, Head of Talent Acquisition and Development at Admiral Group,
- and Xanthe Watkins, Senior Consultant at Great Place To Work UK.
Listen below for best practices and insights as to what it takes to make the list, and keep an eye out for Episode 2 coming soon!
Episode 1: Key takeaways
During their conversation, guests reflected on what an incredible year it's been for the UK's Best Workplace Awards, with the List growing to it's largest ever at 365 organisations recognised across the Small, Medium, Large and Super Large size categories.
Lisa Shaftesley, HR Director at Booking.com:
We feel really proud to be both Certified and recognised [on the Best Workplaces List] for the first time in the first year. It's really fantastic to have that formal recognition.
One of our company values is: Learn Forever. And it is something that threads through the heart of the organisation – from onboarding throughout the employee's lifecycle, growth and development is really given a great priority here at Booking.com.
We have all the basic things in place – such as personal development plans, on-the-job training, formal training, all kinds of different learning initiatives... Some of the more innovative things we do are things like Hackathons, for our engineering colleagues to learn from one another, collaborate, to really get involved with our connected trip initiatives, and AI and things like that. We really look at things from a skills perspective: we have opportunities through one of our hub portals that we're trialing at the moment, to offer colleagues projects, shadowing, mentoring, based on the skills that they'd like to develop. And this really helps us with internal mobility and career development, and also that sense of personal achievement from a development perspective.
Matt Wintle, Head of Talent Acquisition and Development at Admiral Group:
Obviously very proud to have been on the Best Workplaces List for over 20 years. I've worked at Admiral for 18 of those, so I think I've got a fairly good insight as to how things have changed and actually as to how things haven't changed over that time.
Admiral's been set up with some core values – we call them The 4 Pillars: Communication, Fun, Equality, and Reward. They're implicit and the sort of things that people talk about. And although many things have changed, particularly over the last 4 years or so, those core values haven't. And you see them in the way that people act and behave and work with one another day-to-day here at Admiral.
The Great Place To Work survey, and the types of questions that we get from that survey, align quite nicely to those values, and give us some really interesting data as to how we feel we're doing with those core values.
From a practical point of view, life changes, the workplace has changed a lot over the last few years. But in embracing our core values, we've been able to make sure that we can react to the way the workplace has changed, and make sure that we can look after our colleagues in the ways that we always have had.
And in doing the surveys, we're able to listen to our colleagues and get from them how they want to work differently...while we were making decisions about how we push the business forward in the new ways of working, a lot of it was based on what our colleagues were telling us and how they wanted to work.
Our managers and leaders around the business put value on the results of the survey, so that's a really powerful starting point...so therefore the conversations happen and there's reaction to what we see in that data. So I think that's the most important thing, actually, because if you didn't have that sense of significance to the data, then perhaps you wouldn't get the actions and reactions that we do.
And the way it works for us is: every department is sent a breakdown of their data, with a comparison to the previous year, with a comparison to wider Admiral data, with a comparison to the benchmark on the Great Place To Work survey – and that drives the culture we have of continuous improvement.
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