On the importance of specialists, and the importance of people

50 Degrees is an international specialist bid consultancy. I think that the key word there is specialist. But what is it that makes us specialists? Is it our branding, our offices, our systems and processes, our (very) occasionally amusing social media updates?

No. It’s our people.

Our talented, knowledgeable, hardworking, experienced, expert team of consultants. Ultimately our clients are buying the time of our people. We’re very aware that without our people then we aren’t specialists, in fact we’re not much of anything.

This is why we’re committed to attracting and retaining the best people. And if we do say so ourselves, we’re doing a pretty good job of it - take a look at our profiles to see the wealth of experience. We would not have secured £1.5bn+ in new business for our clients in the last 12-months without this impressive bunch.

So it’s absolutely paramount that we look after them properly; ensuring we provide an environment in which they can continue to be productive, creative and keep delivering for our clients. So how do we achieve this?

Well, like the deep thinkers we are, we’ve given it a lot of thought. Our thinking was that we want to go way beyond just making a token investment in our people’s health and wellbeing. The first step was the appointment of Matt Wells, as Head of Wellbeing, and the introduction of our £1,000 a year health and wellbeing allowance, something that John talked about in his latest Blog.

The question then became what next?

Recognising the importance of specialists(!), we engaged HR specialists Petaurum to support us. The brief was that we wanted to create an employee benefits package that really makes a difference on an individual level.

We started by looking at our statutory policies e.g. maternity/paternity leave, and asking a simple question, ‘If I was joining an organisation, would I be happy with that?’. If the answer was no (which we’re prepared to admit it was in every case) then we made significant improvements.

After dealing with the statutory stuff, we then asked another simple question, ‘What employee benefits do people value most?’. Top of the pops in most HR surveys is ‘flexible working’ and ‘health and wellbeing support’. Without being complacent, we feel we’ve got good policies in place here.

So, we then looked at some of the benefits that were a little further down the HR survey list, and talked directly to our people about what they would value… the basic principle was identify a problem, find a solution. A great example of this is GP access. It’s well reported that the pressures the NHS finds itself under has contributed to significant waiting times for GP appointments. Discussions with our people, many who have young families, found this was an issue they were having real problems with… so we’re introducing 24/7 digital access to a GP for all our people.

I won’t get into the detail of every element of the new employee benefits package (it’s a fairly long list spanning store discounts to employee assistance lines through to fertility treatment leave), but I’m really proud it’s been described by Adam Davey (Petaurum founder and Director) as a “remarkable commitment to employee engagement and wellbeing… and one of the best provided by an SME that I’ve seen in my career”.

For us it’s the right thing to do from a moral point of view, and from a business point of view as well.

Emily Bagley-Duncan
Founder and Managing Partner