As many of you may have heard we have received our first ever award under the Best Companies' accreditation programme! Our COO Matt Gascoigne has been speaking about what this accreditation means for Socitm Advisory:
"Best Companies' accreditation programme is recognised as the gold standard for workplace engagement. We are thrilled to have been awarded 2-Star Outstanding, one-to-watch, status for 2020!"
Matt Gascoigne
Chief Operational Officer
"Wow how time flies! It’s almost a year ago now since, at our Senior Leadership Team (SLT) 2-day strategy retreat, we sat down as a group to make some important decisions that would shape the future of both our business and us as professionals. We covered an amazing amount of ground: from our roles within the SLT, the structure of the business and our market segments to the focus areas for investment. At the end of the two days we had a blueprint for success and a shared drive and passion to embark on a significant transformation programme to change the face of the organisation, capitalise on the opportunity ahead and build the next, very special, chapter in the story of Socitm Advisory.
You can’t embark on a truly transformational journey without focusing on harnessing and developing the talent within the business. Everything from attraction, on-boarding, engagement and development of the right people … and at a pace and a volume that for some, could be daunting. A rough plan of 25 hires during 2019 was laid down, incredibly we have just on-boarded our 40th new permanent recruit in this calendar year (I may need to sign off on some sleep for the recruitment team over the Christmas period!). But, there is a cautionary note here. In growing the business so rapidly, we knew that we would have to work incredibly hard to ensure that the strong cultural principles, that had made us a success in the first place, would be passed on to our new recruits. Simply put, the custodians of our cultural DNA would be a team that had been with us for a little more than 6 months, yet another challenge to address on our journey!
As a business that prides itself on its independence we needed to plot our path, the Socitm Way, to make sure that we would keep ourselves on the right engagement track, temperature check our progress and measure our success. Utilising the Best Companies’ accreditation programme, which is recognised as the gold standard for workplace engagement (and is linked to The Sunday Times Top 100 Lists), we set ourselves the ambition of achieving One-to-Watch status by 2021 - our second year in the programme. This became, in our eyes, the logical mechanism to test that all our collective hard work and focus is paying off.
The reality, in undertaking the survey, is that you are placing all aspects of the business under a spotlight, shone down by your harshest critics and those that know you best, your employees! We were ever so slightly disappointed to have over-achieved with a Best Companies' survey assesses the 8 factors of workplace engagement
95% survey response rate (Best Companies’ expectation was around 81%, we were aiming for a full house of course - being ambitious is a constant for us!). Yet, still incredibly pleased to receive detailed data analysis from our team. This has allowed us to understand better those initiatives that are important to our people and the company. We now have clear areas of improvement to weave into our 3-year organisational strategy, which puts our talent firmly in centre of who we are and what we do.
It’s absolutely thrilling to have been awarded the Two Star status; One-to-Watch for 2020 in our first year of taking part! Whilst many of us on the SLT know that this is a fantastic organisation to work for, it’s a proud moment when you discover your workforce feels the same way! There’s now a period of global validation before the formal Sunday Times lists are released, and whilst we don’t expect to make it onto the One-to-Watch in that list just yet – we’ll get a feel for how close we are and how we need to progress.
So, as our journey gathers pace, and as our business goes from strength to strength, we can look back at all the things we initiated on our strategic retreat. Not only are we making great progress against our plans, but we also know we are doing it in the right way with the stamp of approval from our team! "
We will be showcasing our Socitm Advisory 'tribe' this Best Companies Day on February 28th 2020, so stay tuned for a day of celebration!