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.
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.
The review of our EVP and subsequent communication activity has resulted in:
We could not be prouder of the enormous efforts that have gone into improving our EVP, and we truly believe we have a standout offering in the marketplace.
We continue to actively look for new ways to expand and broaden our employee offering to engage, support and encourage togetherness and community as well as personal well-being.
Year on year, our challenge is to continuously improve our EVP and demonstrate that people are our greatest asset.
PAT COXEN
CEO