Partnership homebuilder Keepmoat has designed its reward and benefits strategy to attract new talent, as well as to motivate and engage its existing workforce.
The organisation employs more than 1,100 employees and operates across England and Scotland. Its people strategy is focused on three key pillars: attract, develop and retain, while it also prioritises looking at the benefits its employees want and need. This led to its agile working, dress-for-the-day, valuing difference, and recognition approaches, along with the ability to purchase additional holiday and money-saving schemes.
It also takes the time to listen to its staff and understand what is important to them and why, as part of its people strategy. As a result of this, it enhanced its maternity, paternity and menopause policies, and has changed the start and end times of regional board meetings to better support those with caring responsibilities.
These benefits help to contribute to employees’ engagement with the business, which is a key factor in talent retention, says Debbie Waddington, group HR director at Keepmoat.
“We have an open, collaborative and inclusive people-centric culture, focused around our OneKeepmoat way of working, which is driven by our values and purpose,” she says. “Ensuring our reward, recognition and benefits strategy aligns with our culture and drives the behaviours and outcomes that we need as a business is key. Taking the time to regularly review our offering to align with our business strategy and outcomes, and our people’s feedback, is important to ensuring continued alignment.”
In order to reflect a sense of purpose and belonging and an inclusive culture, Keepmoat uses a valuing difference approach, to support fair, inclusive and respectful ways of working that encourage different voices, views and ideas. It focuses its celebrations across the year on a range of topics, such as physical and mental health and overall wellbeing, financial health, religious beliefs and traditions, and sustainability and social value. It also encourages its people managers to discuss this approach and the celebrations regularly with their teams.
Keepmoat also prioritises having an open, collaborative and inclusive culture that values difference, which reflects its level of care for employees and, in turn, builds a strong sense of belonging, loyalty and commitment. This enables it to retain and attract the best talent and build high-performing stable teams.
The housebuilder communicates its employee value proposition externally via a range of social media channels, its external website and careers pages, and through external recruiters, adds Waddington.
“We also communicate it internally, as our employees are the best advocates of our company as an employer of choice,” she says. “We’ve asked our people to share videos and soundbites talking about why they love working at Keepmoat and we’re incorporating these into our external communications. This is a great example of how we promote ourselves as an employer of choice, by communicating the things we are actually doing.”
