As a fast-growing business with an expanding customer base of over one million, it's essential for First Central to ensure its employees are fully engaged with the business and its aspirations.
Head of HR Zoe Wright, says "Our phenomenal growth is in large part down to the commitment and collective mindset of our people, which is why having a clear understanding of how they feel is mission-critical for us."
That’s why in 2020 First Central chose Workday Peakon Employee Voice as its strategic listening platform. “We saw it as the best solution for our needs,” Zoe adds.
We want people to feel they’re having a positive experience working for First Central, and Peakon’s an important tool in helping us achieve this.
Zoe Wright
, Head of HR
Leveraging Workday Peakon Employee Voice for a positive colleague experience.
At First Central, employee experience is one of the key five drivers that make up the company’s ‘strategy on a page’ (SOAP). According to Zoe Wright, “At the heart of this is the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which is just as important to the business as the Customer NPS.”
Peakon is now the company’s key engagement tool, used for regular Pulse surveys as well as onboarding surveys once a colleague has been with the business for three months. “It’s incredibly powerful, enabling managers and colleagues to interact via the system or face to face,” Zoe continues. “The opportunity for colleagues to remain anonymous is also very important, because they can be completely honest. Overall, it gives us feedback we use to continuously evolve.”
Today, First Central’s overall eNPS sits in the top 25% of the finance sector, which Zoe calls “very high, showing how Peakon is helping us ensure that people are having a positive experience working with us.”
Insight into issues enables focus on areas of greatest need.
According to Zoe Wright, “Peakon has given us insight into the focus areas where we need to spend time. In 2021, for example, it told us that workload was an issue.”
The HR team was quick to respond. “Armed with that insight, we spent the next nine months on a project to improve how people feel about their workloads. And the eNPS score relating to this area has subsequently risen by around 15 points.”
She believes this is a powerful proof-point demonstrating Peakon’s value as an improvement tool. “It clearly points you in the right direction, showing where to focus your time to drive improvements and make everybody’s life better at work – which is precisely what we want to do.”
Helping colleagues feel like a single team across different office locations.
The majority of First Central’s employees are based in the UK, with some colleagues also based in Guernsey and Gibraltar.
Given the importance of employee engagement across the business, an essential goal behind the Peakon deployment was to ensure that there is no sense of these teams feeling separate from the rest of the organization.
As Zoe Wright puts it, “Using Peakon to properly get to grips with how they feel is really helping everyone feel like one business, and that’s very important as we move forward together.”