CIPD podcast: The key to employee recognition and retention

Jennifer Jackson

Hello everyone and welcome to a People Management Insight podcast in association with Zellis, where we will be discussing how to make your employees feel valued. This is the second episode in our six-part series with Zellis on wellbeing in the workplace of now. I’m Jennifer Jackson, Contributing Editor to People Management Insight. And I’m joined today by two expert speakers who are going to be discussing why recognising the contribution your people make to your organisation is so important. I have with me Josephina Smith, who’s the director-level thought leader on reward, and Caroline Drake, who is CPOE at Zellis. Firstly, Josephina Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what you do?

Josephina Smith

So, I started my career as an employment law specialist and then specialised in reward and later became CPO for a small to medium organisation – YouGov. But I’ve also now moved back into reward, and I do some consulting as well. So yeah, had a background in reward, absolutely love HR, and have been in HR for about 21 years.

Jennifer

Lovely. Thanks, Josephina. Caroline, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a bit about your role and why you think employee recognition is so important for organisations right now?

Caroline Drake

Sure. Firstly, great to be here. I lead the people function at Zellis Group, which is made up of Zellis, Moorepay, and Benefex. And we provide pay, HR, benefits, people experiences, to organisations ranging from 50 employees up to potentially 100,000 employees. So, you probably won’t be surprised that we believe every colleague in every organisation should feel appreciated for the work they do. And appreciation for me can take many forms. So, it can come from recognition, be that peer-to-peer leadership in a social way, in more formal traditional methods of recognition. But why is it so important right now? I think is the important bit of your question. Because as we adapt to new hybrid ways of working, I think companies need to think a bit differently about how to recognise colleagues, wherever they’re based, and however they’re working. COVID has given people the opportunity to reflect especially on work and home, on their own personal wellbeing, and many other aspects of their employment. So, the expectations of colleagues continue to change and they expect more – as they should – from their employers. And that does include recognition and feeling valued for the work they do.

Jennifer

Great, thanks, Caroline. Well, designing the right reward and benefits package has never been more important than it has been in recent months. It seems organisations are finding themselves in difficult positions following the ‘great resignation period’. And prospective employees are looking for more competitive salaries, aren’t they? and benefits in the wake of increased living costs and rising inflation. So with that in mind – with competition for the best talent greater than ever – what can employers do to make their packages as competitive as possible? And what are the key aspects they need to cover? Caroline, I’ll come to you on that one.

Caroline

Yeah, it’s difficult, lots of different people who have lots of different needs and expectations. And so, I actually think breadth of offering in the reward and benefits space is really important. I think personalised benefits that adapt to a colleague’s own circumstances and cater for what’s important to them, are going to be much more appealing for employees. And also, I think they’ll help organisations attract and retain more diverse talent. So how, for example, in the current climate, can any benefit offering help people’s money go further each month? That’s really, really important. And so for us at the moment, we’re big focus on discounts and cashback, cycle to work programs, car leasing, and it’s really about the breadth of things on offer, but also making sure that we’re giving people peace of mind, whether that’s around savings, private medical, how we can help people with financial coaching, financial education and awareness. So, for me, it’s about having choice and lots on offer and helping colleagues understand what’s on offer, and how they can best utilise that.

Jennifer

Great, thank you, Caroline. Now, Josephina, you spoke recently at the CIPD’s Reward and Benefits Conference on the topic of how to attract and retain talent in a competitive labour market. How do you use reward and recognition to make colleagues feel valued?

Josephina

I think it’s a really important tool. And in my career, I’ve actually seen reward move the business forward significantly. From a people perspective, clearly, people like to be rewarded for what they do, they like to be recognised for what they do. And it won’t surprise anyone that that starts with the leaders in the business. And leaders need to be really genuine about how they care about their employees and not just give lip service to it, their actions must show that they care. And in particular, for me, from an HR point of view, the whole lifecycle needs to have that thread of care running through it. You can’t say you care, but not have policies that support your people, or helps to remove any barriers that prevent them from performing at their highest level. For example, your recruitment practices, we’ve seen on LinkedIn and Indeed, a lot of articles that suggest really horrible recruitment, waiting times, lack of decision making, all of that becomes obvious to people on fair reward practices that encourage bias, we need to be mindful of all of those. And of course, we need to really go granular on the examples and the type of behaviour that won’t be tolerated within the organisation; behaviour towards one another; leadership behaviour; behaviour towards customers, and of course, holding people to account. So, I look at it from a lens of pragmatism, particularly around embedding those behavioural expectations within your employee lifecycle.

Jennifer

Great, thanks, Josephina. Now, according to recent CIPD research, only 15% of organisations offer benefits to employees who work from home for some or all of the week, and 75% of office-based employers were actively encouraging people back to the physical workplace, yet just 11% offered benefits such as meals, subsidised travel or improved office facilities to actually tempt staff to come back to the office. So what’s the best approach to this new way of working? Should employers be offering different benefits packages, depending on whether people are mainly home or office based? What do you think Caroline?

Caroline

I mean, it goes a bit to the point I said earlier about personalised benefits, I think being the way things are going. I don’t know that anyone really knows what the best approach is. I think there is a lot of seeking to understand what works, what doesn’t work in a hybrid context, for example. And, you know, that’s where coming back to what makes colleagues feel valued for the work they do. Yes, of course, reward benefits, etc, are important. But, you know, having a voice in the organisation and having the opportunity to influence what a company does, how it operates the culture, which for me would include things like this, I think, is quite important. So, I don’t think there’s a one size fits all, I do think organisations need to be open to listening to what’s working for colleagues now what’s not working for colleagues, maybe even pilot and be a bit bolder, and make some changes, and then kind of test and learn. I think historically, we’ve always done things in, you know, kind of from the centre and then launched something and it sticks for, you know, years. And sometimes I think it’s important to try all things quite quickly. So, you know, we trialed, we had a colleague raise an idea to us at the end of last year about, you know, birthday leave, could we give people you know, an extra day’s leave on a day that’s important to them, where they can either choose to spend time with family or friends or spend time doing something that’s important to them. And we just made a quick decision. And we implemented it from January, we didn’t really know how impactful or not that was going to be. It’s been an unbelievable success. It was a phenomenal idea. But I think my my point is, you’ve got to learn, and listen, I think we’d be the two things that I think are really important. And try some things – and we might get some things wrong along the way – then course correct and try something else. But the world of work is changing, as we all know. But it’s not entirely clear what the right way is going to be going forward. Other than I don’t think they’ll ever just be one right way. I think it’s about how can you have a breadth of offering have choice and have this kind of personalised sense that people feel they’re treated as an individual and not as a group?

Jennifer

Yeah, I mean, on that point, feeling valued at work has been found to increase more than just an employee’s job satisfaction, hasn’t it? So, the influence of recognition and appreciation is often got a profound impact on the entire organisation. So how do organisations create that culture? Where people feel valued and appreciated? For what they do? Josephina, what do you think?

Josephina

Um, I think I sort of, you know, covered that in my earlier question. I think I wove it through. But I think, you know, recognition and reward at a team, business unit and organisational level must exist. The most important for me is at the team level because that’s where managers get to understand their people. People value – they really value – that their managers or leaders have taken time out to get to know them and to understand what they value. So when it comes to recognising them, it’s not very hard to do. Managers will know exactly what each member of their team value and will be able to craft recognition and reward to match that.

Caroline

Yeah, I mean, I completely agree on the role of managers, I think what you create as a culture and a company comes to life through how managers operate every day. It’s the person that most colleagues interact with on a most regular basis, it’s the thing where you really know, are the values and behaviours and the culture real or are they just words? And so I think managers have a disproportionate impact actually on helping make colleagues feel valued and appreciated for the work they do. But I do think there are other things, I think what’s becoming increasingly important to people is being part of a purpose driven company. You know, is the work that they do, whatever that might be, is it having a positive impact on customers on society, on the people that work in that organisation? Are there opportunities to learn and to develop? Do they feel that they’ve got a voice and that they can be heard?

Jennifer

Some interesting thoughts there. Yeah, definitely. Thank you both. I mean, it’s not easy to understand how other people perceive us in the workplace. And people are often unaware of what they project. And this lack of self-awareness, it can be quite career limiting content. So, what role do managers play in delivering on workers feeling valued? What do you think Caroline?

Caroline

I think Josephina touched on it brilliantly earlier, they have a huge role to play in getting to understand the individual, what’s important to them, thinking about how they get the best from that individual. Again, there won’t be one size fits all, I don’t think there is one way to manage people, I think you have to understand the people within your team, why they come to work every day, what’s important to them, what’s going on for them outside of work? For me, it comes down to conversations really high-quality conversations, however, you know, informal or formal they may be it’s about frequent regular dialogue and conversations and making sure that they’re truly two-way.

Jennifer

Great. Do you have anything to add to that, Josephina? You were talking about that earlier, weren’t you? About the role of managers in delivering workers feeling valued? Yeah,

Josephina

I agree. It’s a very, very critical role. And in some cases, you know, it’s the make or break. Because, you know, they’re the first touch point for their employees. And firstly, they themselves as managers must be self-aware and sort of understand their role in making employees feel valued. So, there’s an angle that says, you know, on the side, we need to actually, I don’t like to use the word ‘educate’, but support our managers within the organisation to enable them to understand the role and the impact that they have, or could have, on their employees as a result of their own behaviour. And then, of course, there is that aspect of knowing what is in the toolbox to help support their employees and deploy it effectively. So, they need to know what the organisation has; the benefits or the levers that they can pull. And they need to be able to support their employees with it effectively enable enabling them to know where to go, how to seek the support, they need to be that first sort of touch point. And communication is key from the start and creating that awareness that people are all different and may need different types of support at different times, and being really open about that with their teams.

Jennifer

Lovely, thank you Josephina. Now finally we’ve all had to adapt to new ways of working over the past few years. In your opinion, Josephina what have been the biggest opportunities and challenges that have come because of new ways of hybrid working.

Josephina

I mean, I think for me, what impresses upon me every single day is the fact that I remember those times where people would want to work from home and organisations, or their managers will say, Oh, no, you know, it’s kind of like a ‘no’. Now, it’s kind of like the norm. So it’s kind of like, so what were the barriers before? So for me, it’s a huge removal of barriers around, you know, working from home, that flexibility that people crave, it’s kind of now like the norm, people can work from anywhere, where becoming truly global, we used to talk about being global, but actually, now, we can see that we can be global by people working anywhere in the world. We are using it to widen our talent pool, because, you know, in a competitive environment, the cost of employment is actually going up. So actually, from, you know, getting talent from a wider pool, it could mean actually cheaper for the organisation. There’s more choice, and sometimes control given to employees to manage their own life; manage their working life, home life, and make that as seamless as possible. People are supporting organisations are supporting that wellbeing angle, there’s a lot of saving on travel costs. Indeed, employer premises, employers are using this opportunity to save money from buildings that, you know, they asked people to come to the, you know, lots of different organisations have just closed down locations where, people don’t come into very often anyway. So, you know, from that perspective, it’s, it’s created a lot of opportunity, both from an employer and employee point of view. In particular, I also think the challenges that come with that are around the cross border legality. So you know, the tax implications of people moving around the back end admin can be a challenge, it requires some expertise and knowledge. You know, the utilisation of these empty spaces, if or empty locations or buildings, you know, or how do employers utilise it, if they can’t get out of those leases? How do you then bring them people together on a regular basis has become a little bit of a challenge for some organisations. And I think also on the flip side of that is also the wellbeing angle around, supporting employees to have that distinction between work and personal time. I think, for me, personally, you know, work can sometimes morph into my personal time, and when you’re working from home, that can become a challenge for people who are, finding it difficult to sort of manage, particularly if they have huge workloads? So yeah, lots of opportunities there, but also, a number of challenges.

Jennifer

Yeah, brilliant, thank you, Josephina for outlining all of those opportunities and challenges that have come because of new ways of hybrid working. Anything that springs to mind for you, Caroline, to expand on that?

Caroline

I mean, there was a lot there. And I agree with all of it, the most exciting thing, I think, is that it’s accelerated a much more progressive way of working, which honestly, otherwise could have taken decades, potentially, for companies to get to. And so all of the positives that Josephine outlined completely agree with I think she also touched on an important point around kind of wellbeing and the potential risk of loneliness and, you know, there is different things suit different employees. So we have had some colleagues who are very, very keen to get back to the office on a regular basis and actually miss those interactions, miss being in the office. And we do have our offices open for colleagues to be to be in, yet we have other people who are enjoying the ability to be able to work from home, potentially the flexibility that it brings, or the truly global nature where they have global teams, for example. So that there are definitely both opportunities and challenges. I think the biggest opportunity actually is going to be how, how do you find the right way of getting the best of both? So how do you, retain a really strong culture, keep people connected, enable people to feel part of something while still getting the benefits of being able to have this level of flexibility and work from home and that kind of best of both, I think is the magic probably most organisations are wrestling with or trying to get at the moment.

Jennifer

Definitely, yes, lots of food for thought there. Thanks, Caroline. Well, I hope you’ve all enjoyed listening to our speakers today and that they provided you with some useful information to better assist your teams. If you’d like to read more about Zellis’ research, please do visit www.zellis.com. And thank you to Josephina and Caroline for being excellent guests today providing us with insight and expertise for the current climate. You can listen back to the first episode and keep an eye out for the rest of the series coming soon. I’m Jennifer Jackson. Thank you for listening and have a good day.