Heart work

Driving individual growth drives companies’ growth, according to Inflexion portfolio HR experts. Inflexion, understands the importance of people and brought together some of the portfolio to discuss the importance of people. 

Engagement is about feeling like you’re part of something bigger, and working as part of a team to achieve common goals. Motivation may ebb and flow at different stages of a growth journey, whether for an individual or a team, and so maintaining engagement to keep momentum going is crucial.

We understand that people are at the heart of every business, and so support the management teams we back to attract and retain the best individuals to drive their businesses forward. Our dedicated talent management team is experienced in identifying the right people and then providing creative ways of nurturing and retaining them. We are delighted to share the engagement experience of some of our portfolio in this piece and other future pieces. 

Ocorian’s Richard Summerfield, Group HR director, says it’s all about Growth for the individuals

Engagement is a separate pillar within our HR department and we monitor it through independent surveys every four to six months, providing us with data on how people feel about working at the company. We track it on a geography and service line basis, anonymously, and we feedback on a ‘you said, we did’ basis. One big example started 2 years ago, when we were doing four acquisitions at one time, and employees said they would value more contact with (and visibility of) the Executive Committee to better understand what was going on. So we launched 'Exco-hosted breakfasts/lunches' whereby two members of Exco would hold a completely open discussion with up to 20 people, where you could come along and ask whatever you wanted to know. Over 400 people have now attended over 30 of these events across all of our jurisdictions, with a write-up produced after each, leading to tangible actions.

We’ve also invested heavily into the learning and development agenda: When I joined three years ago, there was no centralised route for people to get access to personal development opportunities; we now have a six-strong standalone Learning and Development team based across Jersey, London and Mauritius. As part of our commitment to supporting employee development, we recently invested in a world class learning management system (Cornerstone on Demand) and rebranded it to 'GROW' for our own corporate use. This cloud-based platform allows our 750 employees to access bite-sized learning on any device from anywhere in the world, including downloading and watching/learning offline in a truly flexible way.

As an increasingly diverse global company, we know it’s crucial to enable staff to share their learning and experiences with each other, so we have encouraged a culture of secondments (17 so far) across our key jurisdictions, with secondees bringing their learning to new locations and picking up new learning to bring back to their home teams, and this works really well.

Valerie Rees, Chief People Officer for Alcumus, explains the importance of colleague wellbeing

We are on a journey in Alcumus to be a great place to work, with an important focus on wellbeing to enable all colleagues to come to work and perform at their best, enjoying the environment they work in.

We have introduced wellbeing champions across all our workplaces, including our remote teams. Mental health awareness training has enabled them to identify when colleagues need help and how to signpost them to the right support. Our bi-annual wellbeing weeks led by the champions has encouraged colleagues to get involved in a range of activities including a step challenge competition, a financial wellbeing lunch-and-learn, mindfulness sessions and a plank challenge. These activities are all good fun and promote teamwork, inclusion and wellbeing across the whole business.

Our Alcumus values play a significant part in how we do business; from recruitment all the way through to induction our values are brought to life and we celebrate and recognise colleagues demonstrating the values through the year. Our new employees embark on a two-day induction during which our CEO, Alyn and I personally meet each new joiner to welcome them, talk about the values and ensure they truly feel part of Alcumus.

Supporting line mangers to bring out the best in their teams is equally important, so monthly 1-to-1 meetings are encouraged to keep a regular check in as well as helping keep everyone on target to achieve their objectives. To help achieve this, line managers have had upskilling this year on subjects such as performance management, managing resilience at work and looking after their own and their teams’ wellbeing.

Bringing our values to life and our embedded belief in the importance of wellbeing have really helped with employee engagement, and we know that the more engaged our people are, the more successful we will be as a business.

At LCP, harnessing potential is the driver of staff development, according to Carla Lakey, Head of People

At LCP we create great opportunities for people to develop their careers through having a wide range of clients.  This enables our people to get involved in projects that interest them and complement their skills, which results in them creating new and innovative solutions for our clients. We couple this with a strong emphasis on technical and soft skills training and mentoring programmes to support development.

As a firm we have continued to grow year-on-year. This means that as we expand our client base and service offerings, we can provide people with exciting longer-term opportunities to progress into more senior roles, and ultimately reach their full potential.

In recent years, we’ve also started rolling out programmes which support our colleagues more widely, including sessions on parenting and the importance of sleep for example.  Our work in the diversity and inclusion and charity space also continues to expand and this is an area where we see lots of engagement across the board, in particular from our younger joiners.

Offering interesting work challenges and progression is only part of the engagement solution though. We want people to enjoy coming to work too. We have a really supportive and collegiate atmosphere which means that whilst we work hard, we create lots of opportunities to socialise as well. The positive impact this has really came through in the results of our recent engagement survey where the overwhelming majority said that the best thing about working at LCP is the people they work with.