Our team members are key to delivering great customer experiences and we strive to provide them with a great work experience.
58%
Of our management appointments from internal candidates
11%
Of our team members participating in development programmes
94%
Team members completing online development modules
2 star
High-quality employee experience rating from WorkL
The value we create
Our customers
Our people
Our partners
Our communities
Our investors
Helps mitigate principal risks
Employee retention
Compliance
Contributing towards the SDGs
Attracting and retaining top talent
Our team members are the centre of our business and key to delivering our purpose of bringing friends and family together for affordable fun and safe, healthy competition.
They have been instrumental to our performance in FY2024 which can be demonstrated through the achievement of record customer satisfaction scores. Our strategic pillar; “focusing on our people” reinforces our recognition of our people as a key driver of our ongoing success.
Our people focused activities are designed to attract and retain the best talent in a competitive labour market. Despite the ongoing challenges of recruitment and retention in our sector, our industry‑leading training programmes and limited exposure to EU labour and the London market enable us to continue to outperform our hospitality and leisure peers in terms of team turnover rates.
We foster a high-performance, purpose-led culture that recognises individual contributions which are often promoted through our internal social media channels and in our annual awards programme.
Our generous perks and benefits programme includes team member discounts, top talent development programmes, and performance-related pay. We paid out £636k in bonuses to centre teams, with 60.3% of our hourly paid team members receiving an additional 50 pence per hour bonus in recognition of excellence.
With inflation impacting team members’ finances, we increased average pay in April by 9.2% for salaried team members and by 5.3% for Centre Managers and Assistant Centre Managers. We are committed to paying a living wage to our hourly-rate team members.
Training and development
Working with us is more than just a job – we have a high-performance culture where teams are nurtured through exceptional training and where defined behaviours are rewarded. We know that some of these jobs will turn into long-term careers in leisure and hospitality, and we support our people to grow with us and become future leaders.
We believe that anyone with the right drive and training can become progress in our organisation. In FY2024 we saw record attendance on our team development programmes with 11% of our team participating in one of our top talent programmes.
Our graduate training programme will see graduates develop into Centre Managers within three years. Additionally, our Senior Leadership Development Programme (SLDP), which equips future leaders with the management skills and business knowledge to join the senior leadership team, has 12 colleagues enrolled.
With many roles filled internally in FY2024 and with our planned new centre openings, we again increased the number of Assistant Manager in Training and Centre Manager in Training programmes. We were delighted that a record 58% of management vacancies were filled internally in FY2024.
We launched a new training portal called Thrive to further improve our ongoing team member training, compliance and professional development.
Team wellbeing
Team member wellbeing is of vital importance to us, and we have well-established initiatives in place. This includes 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 free support services and resources for physical and mental health, wellbeing, financial, legal, or bereavement issues.
Team engagement has further improved, and we received a WorkL 2* high quality employee experience in our centres, 3* rating for the support centre and increased scores on employee review websites.
Diversity and inclusion
We value and celebrate differences, 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, committing to non-discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity, religious belief, political affiliation, sexual orientation, age, or disability. Our careers website and marketing activity is designed to reach and appeal to a broad
range of talent and we saw a 69 per cent increase in applications being originated from social media activity.
We continue to host focus groups to make our business more attractive to a diverse workforce. Team members are invited 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 continue to evolve our diversity strategy, and we have representatives for each group who publish updates in our D&I newsletters.
We continue to encourage women to apply for senior roles by offering flexible 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 51 Assistant Managers in Training, 8 Centre Managers in Training, and 4 on our SLDP.
