This is our first year using Great Place to Work. Last October was our first survey. And obviously it's really important to measure employee engagement. We had just come out of COVID-19 and we were using quite a simple version of an engagement survey through one of our other platforms.

So we did what you might call a temperature test to see how people were feeling. A very, very basic survey.

And then, as we started progressing and things were getting back to normal, we felt it was probably time for us to do a real deep dive into employee engagement. Employees have been through a big journey, and what we were using was probably not going to give us the right data.

We thought it would be great if we could measure engagement, but also get the recognition as well. We met with Great Place to Work, and just really liked everything about them. In terms of their survey, it measures trust indexes, the data analysis is really good. You can drill down to your heart's content, and it's going to give us a really great piece of data.

Coming out of COVID-19, we rebranded from GLH to Clermont Hotel Group, and we did a big piece of work internally on brand. We never had a strong employee brand before. We'd had a corporate brand, and that was something that we put a lot of time and effort into, actually understanding what our culture meant for our team members, lots of focus groups, lots of discussions.

The level of data and insights was a really good way to understand actually what we'd done well through that rebrand and realigning visions, vision, purpose, values, but also then to sort of continue focusing on that to sense check what was landing well, where there was still room for improvement in terms of our EVP. I think over the last 12 months, it's really helped shape that.

We've worked with our design team that supported through the corporate rebrand and our marketing team, but a lot of it was led internally, through focus groups, surveys, conversations, so that rather than push something top down into the business, we could understand actually what was already living and breathing and just try and represent that.

We were called GLH hotels, and people didn't know what GLH meant, or what our identity was. So it was a real opportunity for us to completely rebrand and have a real set of values that actually represented who we are, and those values came from our employees.

Doing the whole rebranding and then working with Great Place to Work has just really helped us accelerate our employer brand.

It works on a trust index. There's 60 plus questions that your employees have to complete.

Our results were really, really strong. We met their benchmarking and above and had a really high participation rate as well. We had been running surveys that were 10 or 15 questions but we were about to ask our employees to complete one on an external platform, that was over 60 questions. How are they going to feel about that? But actually, we had a really high response rate as well. So it was a true reflection of how our employees were feeling.

I think people would recommend Clermont as a place to work to their friends and family. So that's really good. And our NPS has improved from 27 to 45, a massive increase.

And I think that what we have done over the last 18 months is actually not one big thing. It's a combination of a lot of different things. And I think that people feel supported at work. They know we care about their health and their wellbeing.

Their line managers care about their employees. People get feedback. They have an annual review. We've just done our annual review process, and there was around a 99% completion rate.

I think we've evolved existing practices to a far better place. So the reviews, for example, coming out of COVID-19 were based on half a dozen questions. We didn't really get a great level of insight. It was very much just giving the team members feedback. And we've incorporated things like questions around health and wellbeing. Do you know where you can get support if you need it? And so on. Do you feel that you are supported by your manager? When was the last time you received feedback from your manager? Are you actively on a career pathway?

Building more awareness, visibility, and opportunity for us to feedback to the team, and the team to feedback to us through all of those existing processes really adds into that trust index, because you feel like people genuinely care about you as a person, and not just your payroll number.