Our people are a unique bunch and pivotal to our success as a Group. It is for this reason that we spend significant time ensuring that we hire and develop the best people.
In 2018 we continued to grow the team, strengthen existing skillsets and started to build internal capabilities in areas identified as key for future success. We spent considerable time refining our internal communication methods ensuring key messages were cascaded to the right audience at the right time allowed our teams to work informed and empowered.
Initiatives
During 2018 we launched a number of enhancements to our benefits following feedback from our team and a review of the external landscape. Three benefits were reviewed and modified during the launch:
- Recognition of tenure – an increased award of leave for 3, 5 and 10 years’ service;
- Flexibility in leave – the ability to buy and sell leave; and
- Increased reward opportunity – adjustment to the maximum reward for excellent performance.
The refresh of our benefits package was not only important to existing staff retention but an important part of creating a compelling and competitive proposition to attracting quality talent.
As well as increasing the maximum outturn for all-employee bonus, we took the opportunity to link reward to Group financial performance, something that was introduced for the first time this year. For the 2018 financial year onward, a portion of all-employee performance related pay is linked to the financial performance of the Group. As a business we felt it was important to align the interests of our teams with the interests of our shareholders and linking reward to business performance allowed us to do just that.
It’s not what you do but the way that you do it
When reviewing all-employee bonus, we also took the opportunity to formally link reward to behaviours and values.
In 2017, the Group spent considerable time resetting norms and focussing on what behaviours and values we wanted to live by moving forward. Through 2018 we formally made the link between behaviours and values and annual reward to ensure that what was being delivered was delivered in a way that fit with our Group values.
Evolution of Values
Standing still is not something that we are good at… evolving our ways of thinking and working on the other hand… that’s more our bag. In a competitive market, evolving our ways of working is pivotal to the way we deliver. Making a step change and evolving an ingrained culture is the start of our journey.
In late 2018, a small group of people got together to brainstorm the impossible… making ways of working at GoCompare even more effective to deliver the next stage of our ambitious plans to save our customers everywhere time and money.
It was at this meeting an idea was born. Rather than five or six corporate values and behaviours, why not one virtue that incapsulated them all? Impatience! We are impatient to deliver improvements, we are impatient to save our customers money, we are impatient to succeed.
If the only thing that we could get our team to do was to think and act impatiently, we knew we would be set to deliver great things.
The team were impatient to deliver the virtue of impatience and created five key streams to ensure the virtue was launched, adopted, reflected within our ED and all employee performance management framework and reflected within our cultural norms such as our town halls and celebrations.
Engaging our team
We recognise that a workforce who are bought-in to our mission, vision and brand will deliver and be more productive. We spend significant time and resource ensuring that we have engagement from across the Group through structured communication and events.
As a Group, we focus on three key areas;