We focus on talent attraction and retention by developing and training our team members, supporting their wellbeing and maintaining a diverse and inclusive Company culture in which they can thrive.
45%
Of our management appointments from internal candidates
11%
Of our team members participating in development programmes
94%
Of our team completing online development modules
5.29
(Out of 7) in our team wellbeing survey
1 star
Rating in Best Companies team survey, ranking us #12 in the Top 25 Big UK Companies To Work For
Supports strategic objectives
Driving like-for-like revenue growth
Focusing on our people
Helps mitigate principal risks
Employee retention
Compliance
Contributing towards the SDGs
Talent attraction and retention
Our team members are the lifeblood of our business and are key to our success. Our people initiatives are designed to attract and retain the best talent in a competitive labour market. While recruitment and retention continue to be a challenge in our sector, our industry-leading training programmes, and limited exposure to EU labour and the London market enable us to perform better than our hospitality and leisure peers in terms of staff turnover rates.
Our team members have been instrumental to our outstanding performance in FY2023. We have a high-performance and purposeled culture that recognises individuals. A generous perks and benefits programme includes team member discounts, top talent development programmes and performance-related pay. In FY2023, we paid out £600k in bonuses to centre teams and 52 per cent of our hourly paid team members received an extra 50 pence per hour bonus in recognition of excellence.
With inflation putting a squeeze on team members’ finances, we increased average pay in April for our salaried team members by 9.3 per cent and by 5.3 per cent for our Centre Managers and Assistant Centre Managers. We are committed to paying a living wage to our hourly-rate team members.
Diversity and inclusion
Difference is valued and celebrated, reflecting the people and communities we serve and ensuring we provide experiences that are relevant, accessible and welcoming. We promote a culture that fosters diversity and inclusion and commit to no one being discriminated against on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity, religious belief, political affiliation, sexual orientation, age or disability. Our new careers website is designed to reach and appeal to a broad range of talent.
In FY2023, we hosted focus groups to make our business more attractive to a diverse workforce. We invited team members to join and lead these groups, resulting in highly productive sessions focused on age, gender, heritage, ethnicity, the LGBTQ+ community
and culture. Feedback from these sessions is helping us to evolve our diversity strategy and we have appointed representatives for each group. Next year we will also introduce groups focused on those with disabilities.
We continue to encourage women to apply for senior roles by offering flexibility in working structures, and enhanced maternity, paternity or shared parental leave. Our approach has resulted in a significant increase in females on our talent programme, with 106 Assistant Managers in Training, six Centre Managers in Training and four on our Senior Leadership Development Programme (SLDP).
Training and development
Working with us is more than ‘just a job’ – it is a high-performance culture, where teams are nurtured through exceptional training and where defined behaviours are rewarded.
With many roles filled internally the previous year coupled with new centre openings, we increased the number of Assistant Manager in Training and Centre Manager in Training programmes. Consequently, 45 per cent of management vacancies were filled internally. We also sponsored three team members to take up HR and Centre Manager roles in our Canadian business – something we hope to offer more in the future.
While we believe anyone with the right drive and training can become a Centre Manager, we have launched a graduate training programme which will see 11 graduates joining in October 2023. This fast-track programme aims to develop graduates into Centre Managers within three years of joining. In addition, our SLDP, which provides future leaders with the management skills and business knowledge to become a member of the senior leadership team, currently has 14 colleagues enrolled.
Team wellbeing
Team wellbeing is of vital importance to us and we have well established initiatives in place. This includes five Mental Health First Aiders, regular communications on Fourth Engage (our internal
social media platform) to highlight events such as World Mental Health Day, wellbeing modules in our training programmes, and our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) which provides a free support service and ideas for physical and mental health, wellbeing, financial, legal or bereavement issues.
