Megan Wiseman
Next month, we're excited to welcome more than 350 HR rebels and leaders to our inaugural Engagement Excellence Summit. We'll take over the Brewery with 30+ amazing speakers to educate attendees on building a great reputation as an employer, championing colleague engagement through technology and creating an amazing wellbeing strategy (among other topics).
Even though it's sold out (I'm sorry!), you can still join the waitlist for your chance at a spot.
The good news is that we'll release some of the featured content around the breakout sessions here on Reward Gateway after the event in mid-February.
To get you singing the tunes of rebels around you, we're counting down to the summit with a Speaker Spotlight on just a few of the rebels we're welcoming to the stage. We've got some of our speakers to answer a few questions so we can get to know them a little better.
We'll be publishing the full agenda of breakout sessions and talks very soon, but during Ben's session, he'll be talking about:
- Using an "always on" approach to employee feedback
- The impact of this approach in Dunelm's own engagement scores
- How to act on feedback to show that you're listening and that you truly care
We last interviewed Rachel Clifford, the Group Head of Reward and HRSS at Spire Healthcare. Next up, we're featuring Reward Manager Ben Waterfield of Dunelm, a home furnishing retailer.
Hi, Ben!
Ben has been a part of Dunelm for 10 years, joining as a colleague in the Leicester store, where he was for about six years before moving on to an Assistant Store Manager role and then to the Support Centre working in the Resourcing Team, recruiting for stores. In 2016 he joined the Reward Team, which at the time was a new function within Dunelm. Over the last three years the team has been defining the strategy, and building Dunelm’s Reward and Engagement brand.
Let's begin...
Who is your favourite rebel?
I love Zappos and its "pay to quit" offer, offering new colleagues money to leave if they don’t like the business. I think it’s great that Zappos are so dedicated to protecting its culture, and as a result protecting its commitment to giving amazing customer service.
What's been the best moment on your engagement journey so far?
Dunelm making it in to the top 50 of Glassdoor’s 2019 Best Places to Work!
Having done a lot of work on engagement and moving our score from 2.9 to 4.1 over the course of a year was a huge success for us.
What's the next summit on your horizon?
Making sure we’re supporting our colleagues' mental, physical, and financial wellbeing. We’ve got a group of colleagues working on this, and we already have lots of things in the pipeline for 2019.
If you were climbing Everest and about to reach the summit, what would your victory song be?
Kasabian – Underdog. One of our Key Business Principles (our values) is "be the underdog." As a business, no matter how high our sales have climbed, we’ve never got complacent, always keeping an underdog mentality. Plus Kasabian and Dunelm are both from Leicester!
What tool would you not be without on your engagement journey?
It has to be Keep Listening and Looking (our employee feedback platform). It would feel wrong to say anything else, it really has rebelutionised the way we approach engagement, but that’s all I’ll say before the day..
Stay tuned for the next Speaker Spotlight...