Telephone answering service Moneypenny has always offered its employees a broad range of benefits that help to create an attractive employee experience.
Among its initiatives, it offers some perks that are unique to its head office in Wrexham: pre-pandemic, the organisation made use of its spacious building by hosting Zumba or Pilates classes, and opened up its fully-licenced onsite pub for after-work socialising on Friday nights.
When the UK government announced the lockdown and work-from-home measures in March 2020, Moneypenny quickly shifted gears to ensure that its 750 employees were able to enjoy some of the same benefits from home. Ceri Henfrey, head of operations at Moneypenny, says: “That gave us a new challenge on the basis that all of [the initiatives] had to go virtual. So we have now got virtual classes and we encourage people to keep going with their levels of fitness.
“We have also done a lot of promotion of things like free open university courses, and to make sure that people are really focused on their wellbeing with hints and tips on how to cope in times of uncertainty.”
Moneypenny has also made sure that communication has continued to ensure that employees still feel engaged with the organisation and their colleagues. “From a cultural perspective, it’s very much about being open and transparent, and having great levels of communication with everybody,” says Henfrey. “Speed of communication has become so critical and is something that we really pride ourselves on.”
The organisation has made use of Facebook Workplace bots to quickly and efficiently send out messages to staff. Henfrey explains: “We first sent out a wellbeing bot, which just said: ‘how are you?’ What was fascinating for me is that we learned that people are really willing to share with a bot how they are feeling. I think some people aren’t always willing to share with us from an HR perspective, but that enabled us to identify those people who needed extra care and support in that time as well.”
To recreate the organisation’s culture and keep engagement high while employees were working from home, Moneypenny kept in touch with various initiatives, including a delivery of letterbox brownies to all employees in June. And, in place of a Christmas party this year, the organisation has planned a special thank you to staff. “To thank everybody for letting us into their homes, we’re going to be putting the Christmas dinner on everyone’s table,” says Henfrey. “We are going to provide either a turkey, ham or nut roast for everybody.” The festive food will be delivered to Moneypenny’s Wrexham offices on 23 December.
The organisation’s longer-term strategy will focus on how people will return to the workplace; for example a hybrid option of home and office working is one consideration, but Moneypenny is fully engaging with employees on what this will look like in the future.