How Peldon Rose became a leading organisation for business culture

A collaborative approach

We took people from across the business, including members of the senior leadership, marketing, people and talent teams, wellbeing teams and our dedicated internal events coordinators Peldon Rose Productions (PRP) to help us achieve our goal. Having a fully remote workforce for much of 2020, we launched various channels including daily emails, virtual lunchrooms, and daily team check ins to connect people. However, it was clear we were missing a home for internal communications – something we may have previously taken for granted by being office based.

In March 2021, we launched TheDeck, our design-led intranet with the purpose of providing a destination digital hub to connect our teams. Encapsulating our unique culture, it’s a place where our teams can feel proud to share their work, knowledge and celebrate success. We utilise the platform to cascade important business updates, onboard new starters, celebrate birthdays and important milestones and announce when there’s cake in the kitchen!

Embedding a wellbeing strategy

We partnered with industry leading charity Mates in Mind to ensure our people and practices had the right level of support, resources, and training in the world of mental health. We now have a dedicated wellbeing team who create a calendar throughout the year and coordinate regular activities to give our people time away from their day job, including massages, yoga, run clubs, nutrition and practical mindset workshops as a part of Mental Health Awareness Week, financial seminars and company-wide breakfasts.

Bringing moments of education, fun and joy

Despite being challenged with a hybrid working model, PRP hosted 15 events in 2021 and 38 in 2022 including Pancake Tuesday and the Platinum Jubilee. Although the pandemic prevented us heading to France for our annual ski trip, we brought Après to Wimbledon with a slope worthy Après night.

We also used annual calendar days to increase awareness for equality, diversity and inclusion topics including Black History Month, Pride, National Stress Awareness Week and International Women's Day with the aim of both raising awareness and educating our people about the issues faced and how to overcome them. We adopted a multichannel approach including ‘Lunch & Learns’ and evening panel events with industry leading guest speakers.

Creating a safe environment

As we embarked on our return-to-work strategy, our dedicated Covid team took a deep dive into evaluating the functionality of our office and construction sites to ensure the safety of our people when returning to the workplace and to support our growing team. Approaching the process, we created relevant signposts, accessible videos, and virtual live walk arounds to demonstrate the safety measures in place so that people knew what to expect before returning. We applied multiple safety measures including flexible working hours to avoid congested commuting times, Perspex screens at desks and social spaces, temperature testing for all entrants to the building, and providing masks, test kits, sanitiser, and home care packages.

Achieving our goal

Following another challenging year in the workplace externally, we were pleased to see a steady decline in absences since 2019, which dropped further in 2020 and 2021, and this trend has continued throughout 2022. We have been pleased to see a positive uptake in our Employee Assistance Programme, a benefit that gives employees and their dependants access to a variety of services including CBT, counselling, and practical advice alongside the BUPA cash plan to support with everyday healthcare.

We’re proud to have provided a destination workplace our people can and want to work from, in a safe way. It is an environment that offers many benefits to people and their mental and physical health, both of which we saw impacted/effected by the pandemic. We pride ourselves on creating a culture that everyone, no matter how long they have been at the business, or where in the business they sit, feel included and empowered. Our culture is what makes us who we are, it cannot be defined by one person or one area of the business – its why people choose to work at Peldon Rose.