Listen: Atom Bank ensures employees are actively involved in shaping its benefits proposition in order to provide schemes that staff truly want and value.
In this episode of the Employee Benefits podcast, Gabby Harrison, payroll, benefits and reward manager, discusses how the organisation seeks and acts upon employee feedback to enhance its benefits package.
As examples, Harrison explains how the bank has recently introduced enhanced parental leave policies and a profit share scheme as a result of direct feedback from staff.
At a glance
Founded in 2014, Atom Bank is the UK’s first app-based and digital-only bank. Its typical job roles include software engineer and site reliability engineer, customer support agents, risk analyst, fraud and financial crime manager, and commercial data analyst, associate pricing and trade manager.
It has around 570 employees, with an average age of 38. The average length of service is four and a half years.
The primary business objectives that impact benefits for the coming year
- Compliance: Preparing for the mandatory payrolling of benefits in April 2027. This will impact the way Atom currently processes its benefits and the advice it gives to employees.
- Profitability: Benefits such as the profit share bonus are dependent on the organisation’s profit within the financial year.
Career history:
Gabby Harrison joined Atom Bank in 2022. She began her HR career working for the NHS in a business improvement team, which involved working with teams within the HR department to improve or streamline their processes. Harrison then held several core HR roles, which mainly focused on employee relations. She subsequently moved into a standalone HR lead role at a start-up company, where her responsibility was to build the policies and processes from scratch.
Harrison’s favourite benefit at Atom Bank is its enhanced family leave: ”It enabled me to have the best year off on maternity leave,” she says.
Throughout her career so far, she is proud of the steps she has taken to build up her qualifications while also working. “I am proud of the fact that following graduation from my law degree, I went straight into studying for a HR management qualification, which I fully paid for, while also working in my first full-time role.
“This qualification enabled me to get the career I have and while it was hard at the time balancing studies with adjusting to full-time work following university, I am so proud that I did it. Since then, I have completed several certificates including a course on mental health and I am currently studying towards completing a payroll-specific apprenticeship,” she says.
