Listen: In this episode of the Employee Benefits podcast, Mike Turnbull, compensation and benefits manager at Novuna, discusses how the financial services firm focuses its reward strategy around flexibility and security for staff.
Turnbull explains that key to Novuna’s strategy is ensuring employees are supported at all life stages in as many ways as possible. The employer recognises that each individual benefit, such as private medical insurance, group income protection or its pension scheme, while valuable in their own right, is an important part of the whole; and as well as being an important employee engagement and retention tool, the benefits package supports the organisation’s talent attraction proposition.
Novuna at a glance
Novuna is a financial services organisation that provides 1.3 million consumer, SMEs and corporate multinationals customers with products and services across its business divisions: Novuna Consumer Finance, Novuna Vehicle Solutions, Novuna Business Finance, Novuna Business Cash Flow and its European division specialising in vendor finance.
Each business unit has a customer service department to deal with customers, queries and complaints. Each business division also has a sales team including business development and relationship managers. Around one-third of roles at the grade two level (junior grades) are made up primarily of customer service executives and advisors.
Novuna has more than 1,900 employees in the UK. The average age is 40.5 and the average length of services is just over six years.
Primary business objectives that impact on benefits for the coming year:
- The need to balance efficiency with the requirement to maintain a high-performance culture and to be able to attract and retain the right employees.
Career history
Mike Turnbull joined Novuna as compensation and benefits manager in July 2018. He previously worked in a range of roles at Marks and Spencer including reward analyst and reward manager.
Turnbull says: “In my current role, I’m proud of having built up a great reward team who deliver excellent work for the business. A lot of our work, for example, compensation reviews, enrolment windows [and so on], goes unnoticed and I’d view that as a positive as it means everything is working as it should, errors are kept to a minimum and colleagues are getting what they need from the team and from the business.”
