Meet the Winner: Best Employee Wellbeing Strategy

Following the 2024 Engage Awards, we’ve had the privilege of sitting down with our winners to uncover the stories behind their award-winning strategies. Our ‘Meet the Winners’ series aims to provide valuable insights into crafting a winning entry while inspiring success and innovation across the industry.

Today we meet GFM, who were our worthy winners in the our ‘Best Employee Wellbeing Strategy’ category.

1. Congratulations on your Engage Awards win! Can you tell us a little bit more about the project that shaped your entry?

It didn’t start with a project, it started with a problem. Our 2023 attrition rate was 85%, it peaked at 102% in September.

For us as a business this meant continual interviews, trainers running back to back inductions with little time to train existing staff.

Contact queued, agents burned out and sickness increased, and most importantly, staff wellbeing was at an all time low.  Our NPS score in July 2023 was -23, our average agent score was 6.15/10.

Agent wellbeing was always a priority for us, we had various different initiatives inconsistently delivered around the business but there wasn’t a strategy, there wasn’t ownership and structurally we weren’t in the position to support in the way that we knew that needed to.

The first thing we did was revamp our senior structure, we hired a head of people and a head of contact centres to focus on improvements in a number of areas.

From there the project to deliver  best-in-class wellbeing strategy, rivalling those of much larger contact centres, while staying within an SME’s budget, was born.

2. What motivated you to pursue this initiative, and why do you think it stood out?

We wanted to shift the narrative around contact centres.  They can be perceived as high turnover, low morale environments where there is no progression and wellbeing is sacrificed for a quick buck.  This is especially true in outsourcers where margins are tight.

We knew this didn’t have to be the case and we had a low engagement, low turnover environment to prove it.

Passion stands out, we care about everyone who works with us.  Our staff were sceptical at best.  We won them round through consistency, drive and delivery.

3. What were the biggest challenges you faced during this journey, and how were they overcome?

There were two clear challenges:

1. Delivering a best in class wellbeing strategy with a small budget
   
   We asked our staff how we could improve their wellbeing. We looked at best practice and accreditation that was available to us.
   We split this into things that cost money and things that took time.  We prioritised the things that people wanted, that took time rather than significant money.
   
   When we proved the concept, and started seeing a reduction in attrition, we were able to start allocating more budget to the more costly areas of improvement, like mental health first aid training for all managers.
2. Convincing our teams that this is lasting change and not a temporary gimmick
   
   We formed a Voice group, a skip level group that meets once a month to discuss where we can improve wellbeing.  One person from each team is responsible for engaging their colleagues and making sure we are focusing our efforts where they felt it should be rather than what we wanted to do.

Each month we were able to demonstrate “you asked, we did” to demonstrate how seriously we took it.  It took time, the atmosphere around the office was transformative.  Good vibes breed good vibes!

4. How has this initiative impacted employees?

Our NPS score went from -23 to +26 in a year, with the average score increasing from 6.15 to 8.38. In one year.

What we are seeing on the ground is a significant uplift in engagement.  People are taking part in all of our incentives, social events and asking when we are doing more.  Our staff trust that we will deliver and feel empowered to be honest about their experience.

Last year we had over 700 less days of sickness.  People want to come to work, they feel valued, supported and happy.

5. What does winning this award mean to everyone at GFM?

We’ve not entered any awards for a few years.  We saw the shortlist for this award and thought we’d done really well just to be listed next to such prestigious companies.

To win is total validation for our strategy. It is difficult to put into words the lift this has given us and how much it spurs us on to do more in the future.

Our staff are reassured they are working for a company who cares and have been recognised for it. 

6. What advice would you give to other companies striving for similar success?

To view all of the our 2024 winners, visit our website.

To find out more about the Engage Awards programme, click here.