Key points:
- SSP introduced a new staff loyalty scheme in July 2015.
- The scheme recognises key long-service milestones and rewards staff with gift cards.
- The scheme complements the organisation’s wider employee benefits strategy in recognising staff performance and loyalty.
The organisation employs around 750 people in office locations around the world, including the UK, Ireland, USA, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Kenya.
As an organisation that has grown through acquisition, rewarding staff loyalty is of particular importance to SSP. In January this year, it introduced a new reward scheme, provided by One4all Rewards, and presented its first employee awards in July 2015.
Clare Bates, HR and transformation director at SSP, says: “We work in a knowledge-intensive sector, so we have to work hard to recruit and retain the right talent. Our Loyalty Awards scheme recognises employees for their loyalty to SSP and celebrates milestone anniversaries approximately every five years.”
Recognising milestones
Through the loyalty scheme, every employee receives a greetings card, a badge and an open-loop gift card to a specified value, to spend at multiple outlets, whenever they achieve an employment milestone with SSP.
Someone marking five years with the organisation would receive a gift card to the value of £50, while an employee celebrating 20 years with the firm would receive a gift card worth £200.
Employees reaching milestones of 25 years or more also receive an additional week of annual leave and a branded gift with the number of years of service engraved upon it.
“The gift cards are an ideal way to reward staff loyalty [because] they offer much greater freedom of choice in terms of what the individual recipient spends their money on,” says Bates.
Broader benefits strategy
Like any organisation looking to attract and retain top talent and secure high levels of employee engagement, it is vital that a gift card scheme such as this complements the organisation’s broader employee benefits strategy.
Bates explains: “With our employee benefits strategy, our aim is to be competitive within our market and also to recognise the performance and loyalty of our employees. We also operate a flexible and voluntary benefits scheme within the largest part of our business, which is based in the UK, and this puts the choice of benefit very much in the hands of our employees.
“While there are some slight differences to accommodate cultural differences, the Loyalty Awards scheme is rolled out consistently across our global operations.”
Workforce diversity
When devising the scheme, a key consideration was the diversity of the workforce in terms of length of service.
Bates says: “Through internal collaboration, we worked hard to come up with a solution that would meet the expectations of our longer-serving members of staff who may have participated in past schemes, while also appealing to our newer recruits who have very different expectations of a loyalty scheme.
“By involving internal stakeholders in the decision-making process, we feel we have managed just that and feedback across the business has been very encouraging.”
Less than a year since its launch, it is still early for gauging the impact that SSP’s Loyalty Awards scheme has had on areas such as staff motivation, engagement and retention.
However, it is the use of the gift cards as part of a larger recognition programme that will ultimately deliver returns for the employer, says Bates.
“We already have good levels of employee engagement and retention,” she explains. ”This is simply another way of demonstrating how we recognise and value the contribution that our people make to the success of our business.
“A lot of the value to the individual comes from having a ‘thank you’ card signed by the people that are important to them, something that is tailored to the individual staff member, rather than the size of the gift card amount.”
