UK 
United States
Welcome to the most civilised corner of corporate America.
That is how Madeleine Merchant describes Macmillan Publishers, one of the 'Big Five' English-language publishers, which operates in over 70 countries, publishing under Pan Macmillan in the UK, Australia, South Africa, and India.
Madeleine Merchant
VP of Human Resources, Macmillan Publishers
As VP of Human Resources at the global trade book publishing company, Merchant says the culture is quite unlike any she has been privy to in her career.
"After five years of HR Olympics through COVID-19, return-to-work mandates and the rest, so many companies say they're people first, but here you can see it and feel it."
She points to the organisation's consistently high employee engagement scores which have hovered around 90%, alongside turnover rates less than 10% - for the entirety of her tenure.
Merchant says: "It is incredibly hard to measure a feeling, but at the same time, I don't think data measures a feeling perfectly either."
"I like to look at the quantitative data, the qualitative data, and then how things feel in my body; walking the halls and seeing how things were actually living and breathing - that's when it started to really come to life for me."
Three or four key themes have consistently emerged from annual employee surveys and pulse checks, helping Merchant understand what has sustained engagement and kept the company's culture strong.
