We’re delighted to have won two national employment awards at the UK Employee Experience Awards (UKEXA) in London, which recognise and reward great employment initiatives in the field of employee engagement.
We’ve worked tirelessly to produce an employee benefits package that is leading-edge for a SME employer, including a healthcare scheme for all our employees, family membership of LinkedIn learning, Perkbox (employee discount portal), bonus potential for every employee, your birthday off work and the ability to bring your dog to work.
It’s fantastic to be recognised so early in our journey by being given two silver national awards, firstly for being an Employee Centric Company and putting our employees at the heart of everything we do and for Employee Engagement – Health and Wellbeing.
The UKEXA is a vehicle for sharing best practice and enables the organisations who enter to promote continuous improvement, learning, and personal development.
The finalists are assessed by an independent panel of judges through both the written entry and live presentation on the day of the finals, with a scoring criterion endorsed by Cranfield School of Management.
We’ve particularly focused on wellbeing and asked David Beeney, managing director of mental health organisation Breaking the Silence to help get everyone involved in awareness sessions that broke down the stigma of talking about mental health.
It is now commonplace for our colleagues at all levels to be sharing their experiences with each other without any fear or stigma. Through one of our services it has been possible for our employees to obtain a psychiatric assessment from specialist nurses within 24 to 48 hours of them raising issues which enables them to access support extremely quickly. This, among other wellbeing offerings such as a wellbeing toolkit, designed in conjunction with mental health charity MIND, has helped us to maintain an attendance rate of 97%.
Jane Austin, HR director said: “We are thrilled to have won our first two national employment awards as Wave.
“The culture we’ve created is caring and supportive, and our HR team has been extremely creative in developing a benefits package and wellbeing programme that delivers on needs yet is affordable. It proves that you don’t need big budgets to be a great employer, just vision, passion and determination.”
David Beeney from Breaking the Silence said: “I have had the privilege to support over 80 different corporate companies with their wellbeing programme and without doubt Wave is one of the businesses that has been most successful in creating a kinder culture of trust. Of all my clients, Wave have been one of the most effective in making their employees feel valued. From my observation this has been achieved by consistently demonstrating how much their employees matter to them.”
