Home Group recognition scheme boosts corporate values

Housing charity Home Group offers its staff recognition e-cards to send to one another for helping to better represent its core values and increase employee engagement.

So far, 12,000 of these have been sent to employees. The organisation also conducted workshops in-house with employees and managers about how to better live the valued.

The organisation implemented its values of being accountable, commercially minded, caring, and energised to its 3,500 staff in April 2012.

As a result of its approach, Home Group was awarded for employee engagement at the UK Employee Experience Awards 2014. It won the Employee Engagement – Delivering Cultural Change award because of its structured and planned approach to embedding its values.

Elouise Leonard-Cross, head of organisational development and learning at Home Group, said: “Staff recognition is very important to us, which is why we have already offered staff e-cards to send to each other with represent our values. There have been 12,000 of these sent so far.

“We wanted to implement our values through simple language inspired by face-to-face surveys we conducted with employees. We also wondered what the workplace would look like if our values were present, and what it would look like if they weren’t.

“Every eight weeks our chief executive [Mark Henderson] gives all new starters a face-to-face introduction to our values. For example, we have dummy shaped sweets with the tagline ‘Don’t spit your dummy out’ to represent accountability.

Home Group also relaunched its flexible benefits package in October 2014, with a single web-based portal called Reward Scene.

Other winners at the UK Employee Experience Awards include Northern Gas Networks, which won the award for Employee Engagement – People at the Heart.

Mark Horsley, managing director of Northern Gas Networks, said: “Over the last few years, we have been working hard to transform our business so I’m thrilled that we have been recognised.

“Customer and employee satisfaction are issues that are intertwined. By empowering our employees we have become an organisation that now not only outperforms every other UK utility business, but also many of the UK’s top retailers and financial institutions in terms of customer service and employee engagement.”

The overall winner of the awards was Nationwide Building Society for their entry into the Learning and Development category. Nationwide also won an award for Learning and Development.

Other winners include Nationwide Buidling Society, BT, LV=, Virgin Money, DFS Trading and Scottish Water.

Neil Skehel, managing director of event organiser Awards International, said: “We are truly inspired by all the best practice showcased at this year’s awards.

“We have seen some outstanding examples from organisations which have embraced employee experience and, as a result, have reaped the benefits in terms of business growth and customer engagement.”