How your feedback helps us to become a great place to work
- VetPartners Marketing Team
- Mar 16, 2023
- 4 min read
VETPARTNERS has been ranked 5th in the UK’s Best Companies to Work For Q1 2023 national list, and 2nd in the health and social care sector.
We are recognised as a company that cares about doing things right, values our people and understands the importance of a truly engaged workforce.
Thankyou to all our colleagues who responded to the b-Heard Employee Engagement Survey. For every colleague who responded to the survey, VetPartners donated £1 to our chosen charity of 2022, The Cinnamon Trust, and we raised a grand total of £4,020.
What can we celebrate?
The majority of colleagues surveyed agreed that VetPartners has a strong sense of family, and they have fun with the team they work in.
Colleagues feel there are opportunities to learn and grow within the organisation.
Most colleagues surveyed told us that they wouldn’t leave if they were offered another job in a different organisation.
What did we hear?
Pay is on our colleague’s minds
Compounded by the cost-of-living crisis, and the impact of this on our colleagues who are seeing increases in mortgages, rent, utility bills and food bills. We would like to take the opportunity to remind our colleagues of the Health Shield cash plan, where you can claim back for dental, optical, physiotherapy and a range of other services. There is also the Perks section, which provides retail discounts and can be found by logging into your Health Shield account.
We are listening and VetPartners applied multiple annual salary reviews in 2021, 2022 and we have our next annual salary review planned for April 2023, inclusive of the new VetPartners national living wage of £10.50 per hour (over 23 years of age). We benchmarked our salaries against the SPVS survey, alongside benchmarking against 11 of our competitors. The work we have been doing around Career Pathways is now being cascaded across our practices, providing transparency of pay and opportunities to develop into the next level roles.
We are still accepting applications to our Hardship Fund for those colleagues who need it. In the past 12 months we have helped 127 of our team members .
Organisational clarity and our cultural values
They remind us all that our behaviour towards one another matters, ensuring that we are all conscious of each other’s job satisfaction. Ensuring our teams are communicated to on a regular basis on business matters that help give clarity on the “Why” we introduce new initiatives, schemes or changes within the business.
Our colleagues believe we could be doing more in the social conscience space
We know our colleagues are passionate about this topic and we wanted to share what we have done so far and will continue to evolve. Giving back to the local and global community is hugely important to VetPartners.
In 2022, the total raised for charities by VetPartners colleagues and company donations was £150,002 – more than triple the total from 2021.
In recognition of our colleagues’ commitment to good causes, in Spring 2022 we began matching donations from our businesses’ fundraising events up to 100%.
In total we have earmarked £120,000 a year to support charitable causes.
In September we launched our partnership with the World Land Trust, an international conservation charity protecting the world’s most threatened habitats and species.
We pledged to support the organisation’s Buy an Acre and Plant a Tree programmes for at least five years, and rather than asking colleagues to fundraise, we sponsor engagement, team building and wellbeing activities with donations. In 2022, we donated more than £14,000 to World Land Trust, safeguarding 143 acres of the world’s most threatened habitats.
Donating money isn’t the only way to give back, so we have started offering all colleagues a paid day off every year for the purpose of volunteering.
People gave their time to a huge variety of causes, including pro bono work for StreetVet and Dogs on the Streets, food bank collecting and coordination, inspiring future generations of vets and RVNs with talks in schools, and several team litter picks during the Great British Spring Clean in March.
Through our corporate membership with Investors in the Environment (iiE), we subsidised iiE membership for 29 of our companies in 2022. By the end of 2022, five had achieved Bronze and one had achieved Green. The central support office achieved the Bronze award in 2022 and is now working towards Silver.
We also provide discounted recycling for the ‘unrecyclable’ through TerraCycle, and in 2022 we recycled 5.6 tonnes of PPE, plastic film, pet food pouches and medication blister packs: an increase of 0.4 tonnes on 2021. Normally not recycled, our investment in TerraCycle Zero Waste Boxes for our practices allowed us to give these materials a second life rather than sending them to landfill or incineration.
Here, our CEO Jo Malone, along with our Chief Operations Officer Mark Stanworth and Head of People Chey Machin discuss the results of the survey: https://vimeo.com/806778082/f33ccd6992
The engagement survey is also important at local level and each of our businesses is listening to their own colleagues and working to improve engagement. As a result, 30 of our veterinary practices were rated as 3 Star accreditation, reflecting ‘world class' levels of workplace engagement, and 30 of our practices were rated as 2-star accreditation reflecting ‘outstanding’ workplace engagement.
Want to know how your workplace can achieve a 3 Star engagement rating? Take some tips from two of our practices who achieved just that here:
Gillivervet
Oakhill Vets
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