Danni Rush, Chief Operating Officer of Virgin Incentives and Virgin Experience Days
Employee engagement is a constant challenge for HR professionals. It is the key to driving staff retention, maintaining and increasing productivity, and creating a successful workplace culture. But the past year and a half has made the challenge even greater. The pandemic enforced remote working on a lot of workforces and the separation negatively impacted employee engagement for many businesses and their staff.
But, as we emerge from lockdown restrictions and into a new working environment where employees are driving calls for increased remote working on larger scales and for the long-term, how can businesses – and in particular their HR departments – keep teams engaged with their employer?
Growing employee engagement during a pandemic
At Virgin Experience Days and Virgin Incentives, we saw the pandemic as an opportunity to transform our employee engagement strategy and even futureproof it for a post-pandemic workplace.
In early 2019, after a successful peak trading period and backed by a new investor, the commitment was made to continue the growth journey centred around our people and culture.
Previously founder led, the business was traditional in its approach to people, with team engagement not featuring as a metric for measuring success. However, with a new executive and senior leadership team in place, the business decided to introduce a new feedback platform to better understand the team, and our first engagement survey was initiated. With a score of just 54%, there was work to be done. We set ourselves a target of reaching a 70% engagement score within a year.
Our objective was clear, establish and sustain a culture which is reflective of the business, the business that we aspire to be and the people we need to create it, in order to drive our ambition of being the go-to provider for corporate rewards and all things experiences.
The first step to achieving this was to appoint new roles at a leadership level who were skilled in cultural change management, with proven experience of bringing teams along on the journey. And so, a Chief Customer Officer and Head of People roles were established.
Throughout our employee engagement transformation journey, we sought feedback from the team. We closed the whole business for a day and took everyone off-site, where we discussed our purpose, workshopped ideas around who we are as a business and what values we aspire to. We established five pillars of growth which were communicated to the team – clear vision, wellbeing & social, communication, personal growth and recognition – all underpinned by our sixth and most crucial pillar: team engagement.
Working groups for functionality sessions were also created to really delve into each department’s purpose to enable easier collaboration and a new peer-to-peer recognition system based upon our values was implemented to keep the team better informed and connected.
A new performance management and bonus system was also created, based on individual and team objectives, to better establish our core values. And new policies such as flexible working, and new benefits such as enhanced parental leave and our behavioural framework, were launched following the workshops.
With our team more invested in the business than ever, we were in a better position to face COVID than we could have possibly imagined one year earlier. So, when the pandemic struck in 2020, the team understood the reasons for us making some tough decisions around the use of the furlough scheme. Transparent and honest working practices had been established and meant it was easier to communicate in a tricky trading climate. It meant we could also ask for their direct feedback as we entered a second period of furlough as a means to reform the way we approached it the second time round. Instead of fully furloughing 40% of the workforce we instead used flexible furlough and had every person in the business furloughed for one day per week, inclusive of the exec team to better reflect our values of togetherness.
The results
We continued to run pulse surveys every three months to check our progress and ensured that results were communicated openly to the business immediately afterwards. Every department had sessions after the surveys to discuss their own results and what action plans would be put in place off the back of it.
Although a challenging period for the business – as with many others across a range of sectors – our employee engagement reform focused on employee feedback and ultimately secured Virgin Experience Days the gold award at the UK Employee Experience Awards.
By listening to what our team really want and need, we have achieved our best ever peak trading period growing revenue upon the previous year by 40%, reduced churn by 18.6%, improved our CSAT scores by 16% and all underpinned by a business-wide engagement score of 73%, a huge 19% improvement in one year.
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