People Policy

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• Introduction
• Organisational culture and approach
• Attract and retain high calibre people
• Real life and rewards

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Introduction

We want to encourage our staff to be active citizens, committed to high performance and continuous improvement.

As a knowledge-based organisation, our continued success depends on the expertise, talent, interpersonal skills and proactivity of our people. To be regarded as effective we need to be responsive to, and trusted by, our stakeholders. We aspire to empower and appreciate each other and operate with the principles of fairness and integrity at all times.

We will seek to achieve this aim through implementing our People Policy, which articulates our overarching principles in relation to people management and identifies the following aims:

• promote an organisational culture that embodies the Agency ethos and values
• have an approach to human resource management that supports the delivery of Lesniak Swann’s strategy within a continually evolving environment and is based on the organisation’s overarching principles
• attract and retain high calibre people
• provide training opportunities throughout the year with a budget for every individual to undertake appropriate form of training
• enable people to achieve their full potential in delivering Lesniak Swann’s success, and encourage creativity and innovation in appropriate circumstances
• provide people with a healthy, safe working environment in which individuals are treated with respect.
• encourage members of the team to support the chosen charity of the year in fund-raising activities and matching the time spent with paid leave.

Organisational culture and approach

We believe in trusting people to do the job they are paid for. We provide the knowledge, understanding and tools needed, and then trust the individual to make – and be responsible for – their own decisions.
Everyone has input into our internal processes and systems. We expect them to have opinions and we want to hear them. We believe the team should know about the company’s performance and go through quarterly updates with all team members.
We want everyone to feel a sense of responsibility, to share knowledge, to support each other and to help our clients exceed their objectives.

Attract and retain high calibre people

Employees are encouraged to treat work-time flexibly. We provide the training and guidance to do that effectively.

We provide support to employees to do their job the best they possibly can. We want to constantly develop employee’s skills and extend their potential.

Professional development is an annual KPI for all our people, and everyone receives a personal budget to spend on training to develop their skills. Throughout the year, we also run general training courses open to clients and staff, on skills like proofreading, storytelling and presentation skills.

Each month we have a full team lunch to share learnings between teams.

Every year, each individual will have a two-stage review. The first stage looks at the past year; the second stage looks at the year ahead. Everyone also has monthly one-to-ones with their manager to discuss any decisions or tasks that they’ve struggled with, what work has interested them, what has gone well, and many other things.

Real life and rewards

To help attract and retain the best people, we pay at the top of the local pay scales for our industry.

Our standard holiday allowance is 25 days plus bank holidays. On top of this allowance we close for Christmas and we give employees time to attend children’s school events or other family occasions.

When the firm does well, we want to share this with everyone. So if the agency hits its targets, we automatically pay a bonus to those employees who have hit their target, too.

Our charity work is time matched by the firm meaning that if an individual gives up their own time to raise money for the chosen charity we will give them the time back.

We also pay 5% into a pension scheme.

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