What do think was behind the most recent Great Place to Work win? Four in a row now!

I think it was more about external recognition of positive things that we knew were going on within the business. We've always had a an employee opinion survey that is done across all 600,000 employees in the Deutsche Post group in September. And don't get me wrong, there are other ways that we measure, more reactive responses to how people are feeling, and we do pulse surveys and things throughout. But I think there was an opportunity to make sure that we were not just benchmarking internally, but also externally.

Our people are generally very committed to what they do. They're good at what they do. We truly believe people do make the difference.

We train people well, and we have a series of programs that we brand under Certified, that are really impactful. But there's a lot of rituals in Express. We have really amazing Employee of the Year awards, and it builds up to people having a huge celebration of that. We have sporting competitions, with a particular focus on soccer. In the UK, we give every single person a hamper at Christmas. And all those little things build up to the sort of traditions and rituals that people expect, that makes it that bit special and that bit different.

They must give you reasons why you won. Was there something specific which you were commended for?

They don't always reveal exactly what the detail is, because obviously you have the survey results that give you really good data, and we purposely time it now in Europe, so that we've got the Great Place to Work survey typically around May time, and then our employee opinion survey is around September.

Knowledge Portal

Big Interview | EVPs, stress 'heatmaps', & wellbeing: KPMG's Workforce Director on avoiding HR 'mediocrity' in 2025

It gives us the external view and the internal view six months apart. We know that when we look at all those results and all that data, that gives us a pretty strong view. We can use that data to dig really deep and say, ‘have we got particular areas where there are gaps, or what are the things that we're particularly good at?’.

It must be quite hard to crunch the numbers of 600,000 people, and I’m sure it throws up quite a wide variety of opinions. How do you sift through that?

There are experts in our head office in Bonn who've done it for 10 years. And actually, the joys of digitalisation mean that where you used to disappear off into a hole for six weeks and you didn't hear anything, now we're all complaining if you haven’t got the results in a week.

We have a database where we can run all the reports off across the whole group. Sometimes people will vocalise things that make you think ‘I'm not sure this is the best place for that’. We've got other ways for people to share a personal gripe perhaps, with lots of different communication methods.

How important are the results to the management?

I'm just prepping for a European Business Review for the UK board, and as part of that, I will be expected to present our Great Place to Work results and our employee opinion survey results. How do we compare? Have we improved? What are the challenges? What are our action plans? The most senior people in the business are looking at this stuff. It's a measure of success. It's very important. It's how we do things around here.

5. Do the results of your surveys tend to throw up the same sort of things year after year? Or are there new things continually being added to the mix?

I think you do see different flavours. If I think specifically of the UK and what's been going on in the country, of course, the cost of living has grown significantly and we've seen significant increases in the national minimum wage, so people may comment about salary increases. What's going on in people's lives impacts how they respond. And you can get a feel for that. Very rarely are people going to write in a survey ‘you pay me very well’.