Boosting Employee Engagement and Retention at Cornerstone.

Challenge

In 2021 Cornerstone, like many companies, was facing up to a world starting to readjust in the wake of COVID and changing dynamics in the workplace. For us, this meant dealing with an annual turnover of 12%, an average time to hire of 60 days and employee engagement at 70%.

Research from the current state of the UK economy meant we needed to build further upon our existing EVP of financial and well-being offerings alongside our other benefits such as Private Medical Insurance, Employee Assistance Programme, and 30 days annual leave. We needed to deliver a more meaningful offering to improve our engagement score and to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

We set ourselves the target to within a year reduce our turnover by 35%, our average time to hire by 10% and increase our engagement score by 5%.is.

Approach

We began by understanding the key drivers for our turnover through exit survey analysis which identified the leading cause as base salary. This came as no surprise given the buoyancy in recruitment and the market being candidate driven, with bidding wars not uncommon between employers.

In addition, we offered all employees the option to salary sacrifice their STIP benefit into their pension before tax which enabled them to pay reduced personal tax and NI contributions and retain more of their money within their pension pot.

Traditionally our Board would approve annual salary increases aligned to RPI, which at the time was around 3%. We knew that with the cost of living and NI tax rise this increase was not enough. Therefore, we invested our energy in creating a proposal demonstrating the need to increase the percentage to 6% and deliver a universal pay increase for all our eligible employees. Through extensive market research and intelligence, we were able to convince our Board of Directors this was the right thing to do.

We also amended our Short-Term Incentive programme (STIP), which previously saw two employee levels receive the same STIP incentive, regardless of the greater expectation of strategic and managerial output from the senior level. We delivered a proposal that increased the percentage awarded to this level by 2.5%. This allowed us to positively message their value as employees and recognise the additional expertise and strategic skill they bring to our organisation.

Beyond financial

• events such as IVF, menopause, and domestic abuse. We also give time off for a child’s first day at school.
• We adapted our Learning & Development strategy to become more accessible to all and to focus on strengthening the core of our organisation rather than targeting our senior leaders. Cornerstone achieved this through opening our key partnerships with organisations such as Henley Business School to our whole business. We trained three employees to become qualified coaches, who now offer a free coaching service to all employees covering both personal and workplace conversations.
• We redeveloped and relaunched our internal recognition programme to become more accessible to all our employees.
• We updated our working conditions and shifted to a hybrid working model, opening our office three days a week. For those who attended the office, we continued to provide complimentary cold canned drinks, a free selection of teas, bean to cup coffee, bottled water, and fruit baskets, as well as introducing breakfast pastries and cakes.