At People Lab, we love to hear about the great work that people are doing for employee engagement and experience. At the beginning of this year, we were lucky enough to attend the Employee Engagement Awards, where were surrounded by enthusiastic and like-minded individuals, passionate about engagement.
To celebrate this, we’re sharing a series of blogs, showcasing some of the winners, as well as other organisations across the world, dedicating their time to creating great places to work.
One of the stand out winners were Cooper Parry, taking home not one, but three awards!
And their fantastic year has continued as they’ve been recognised as one of the Sunday Times ‘Best Companies’.
This week, we caught up with April Bembridge, Chief People & Culture Officer, who told us more about what makes Cooper Parry such a special company to work for.
Hi April – it’s great to speak to you today, and before we start, congratulations for an amazing year! Can you tell us a little bit more about the awards you won?
Thanks Katie – we were delighted to be nominated for the awards and even more delighted to win. We won the Benefits award, the SME Engagement business of the year and the overall European Engagement Company of the year award.
Company of the year! That’s fantastic – I bet there was some celebrating that night! I’m really interested to hear more about the award you won for Employee benefits – what do you think it is that makes your approach different or special?
There was definitely some celebrating! We were so overwhelmed to win the overall award – a few (happy) tears were shed!
In terms of the benefits award, this was really important to us – because benefits aren’t just about unlimited holidays, pool tables and free sweets, or even great pension schemes or discount perks (although we know they matter too). We try to take a much broader, more holistic approach to benefits and ask ourselves ‘What would make people want to work for Cooper Parry’ – and more importantly ‘what will make them want to stay?’
So, the benefits are about the whole journey – how do we benefit their careers when they are with us, how do we make every day better, how do they personally grow and benefit as a human being? how does working for Cooper Parry make them better outside of work and how does Cooper Parry benefit their families and their communities?
When we look at it like this, much more broadly, we see how ‘benefits’ are intrinsically linked to personal development, learning, wellbeing – health/finances, the ability to have time to support the local community and the opportunity to get their families involved in Cooper Parry social activities.
I could give loads of examples of how we do this and could go deeper on any one area, but a couple of examples are our financial wellbeing programme – we have a full calendar of activity linked to financial wellbeing alone. And then our social calendar is about getting families involved, so, this year we held a family circus event and previously we have had roller discos and a drive-in movie theatre in our car part for CP’ers and their families.
In terms of the community, we have a community day where we completely shut down the office – everyone gets involved, but we also hold events in our offices – we hold a senior citizen Christmas meal every year and invite local care homes to that, we also did a summer tea dance, so it’s not just about going out to the community, it’s about bringing the community in to us too – this is so important to everyone at CP and makes people feel truly proud to work for us.
That’s brilliant!
In general, what do you put your recent successes down to? How would you sum up what it is that makes Cooper Parry such a great place to work?
For me personally, it’s about creating an environment where people want to join, but also want to stay for as long as possible. If they do decide that the time is right for a change, they know that we’ll wish them well and that we hope they take away some amazing memories, experiences and learnings and that they stay in touch. They’ll continue to be an advocate of CP, they‘ll recommend us and they’ll be welcome back anytime. We hope that everyone knows that’s how we feel and so there is real freedom to be yourself, to be honest.
We promote a strength-based culture, this is fundamental for us. We focus on what people are good at, we help them to understand their strengths and we create opportunities for them to play to those strengths every day. We are trying to build a culture where everyone who comes to work has found that sweet spot – that place where they are doing what they love, what they are good at – and getting paid for it. Have you heard of Ikigai (a Japanese concept to a long and fruitful life?) that’s what we are hoping to create.
I love this – using a strength-based approach is so transformative to organisations – we’re huge promoters of it!
I also noticed that you’ve recently moved in to a new office space as the business continues to grow – do you think keeping this winning culture will be a challenge as more people join?
It’s a really interesting question – one we get asked quite a lot. The important thing is that we don’t stand still – we continue to evolve and change. The culture that people see at CP today wasn’t always there and it didn’t happen overnight. Cooper Parry has been around a long time and hit some tough times following recession – that’s when the whole ‘People first’ approach first got talked about, we needed to change. And as the world continues to move at an incredible pace we too need to evolve.
Not so long ago, we all talked about what the millennials of the future would want in a work place – we are now (at Cooper Parry) more than 70% millennial workforce – but us millennials are all grown up -we now need to be talking about what Gen Z want and need in the work place – and we already need to be thinking about what Gen AA will want in the workplace because they will be here before we know it and we can’t afford to wait until then to create the workplace that will desire.
So long as we keep thinking ahead, don’t get complacent, then that will put us in good stead. More importantly though we need to continue to hire correctly and robustly. We take our time hiring and the process is thorough, because we know if we get that right and we stay true to our culture – don’t panic hire, then the culture we have so clearly defined will continue.
Thank you so much April, I think there’s so much that can be learnt from the work you’re doing at the moment at Cooper Parry. I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear from you – and I’m really looking forward to hearing about more awards and recognition for you and the team in the future.
