The challenge

Vimto takes pride in being a great place to work. To ensure they maintained great working environments, they commissioned The Survey Initiative to devise a bespoke staff survey to identify what they did well, plus areas for improvement.

What did we do?

We started working with Vimto back in 2015, we began analysing the issues that would be important to the company and after pre-survey consultation with its staff members we created a bespoke survey to meet their needs.

The results of the first survey were strong and reinforced Vimto’s views of their company culture. The results of this survey were shared with the workforce at a conference via video and focus group meetings across the group.  However, Vimto wanted to further improve on their very high levels of employee engagement.

A further survey took place in 2017 to analyse the results of their hard work.

Action

First up, Vimto established a collaborative strategy to place employees at the heart of shaping Vimto’s company values, and power was devolved to a local level to enable teams to make things happen.

To bring the organisation together and for all to get behind the company’s values, a series of focus groups from all over the organisation were set-up to discuss Vimto’s values. Lots of buzz words, feeling and sentiment were collated and staff were involved in distilling these thoughts into six new company values:

  • Proud to be part of the family
  • Deliver Wow
  • Create Fun
  • Pause, be brave and make a difference
  • Passionate about what we do
  • Find a better way

The values were launched at a quarterly business get-together by members of the focus group and met by a rapturous response. All employees understood the non-corporate speak and engaged in the values like never before.

The values are shared on company email signatures (not obligatory), internal collateral, such as notepads, posters etc and are commonly referred to. HR also use the values as part of their recruitment process and ensure all new faces fit with the company’s new values.

The integration of Noisy Drinks Company added another dimension to the campaign. As with any integration there are always fears to be allayed, so once all process/system differences had been ironed out, a conference was set-up for all to meet their peers, understand Vimto’s strategy and values in more depth and start to feel more part of the Vimto family.

Vimto has an annual employee recognition scheme ‘STAR’ (Striving Together to Achieve Results). One of the categories was ‘Team of the Year’, for 2016 every team member was included in one or more team nominations, therefore to recognise their ‘One Team’ mentality, they awarded every employee their birthday off in 2017.

Following the success of the values work the cross functional team were tasked with re-invigorating the STAR awards, the result of which has found the awards becoming “for the people, by the people” and awarded based on the six Vimto Values.

Results

In 2017 The Survey Initiative ran a further employee engagement survey to quantify the results of Vimto’s campaign, and the results were beyond expectations:

  • 88% response rate
  • 91% of employees feel that action will be taken on the results of survey
  • 92% staff believe communication is open and honest
  • 95% levels of engagement
  • 98% of staff feel positive about working for Vimto
  • 99% workers proud to work for Vimto
  • 100% of all staff would like to be at Vimto in 12 months
  • 100% staff feel senior management demonstrate company values

The results were outstanding! It has proven that a collaborative strategy has really engaged staff members across the workforce, plus newly acquired business too. These results were announced to staff at a quarterly general meeting and was topped off with a celebratory hoedown!

The future…

The biggest challenge for Vimto is sustaining these incredibly high levels of employee engagement. The company will continue to talk to its employees, discuss and monitor better working practises to ensure Vimto remains a fantastic place to work.

“The Survey Initiative really got to grips with our business and created a survey that helped us gain usable data to help us move forward. Their analysis gave us great insight into our business and was very easy to understand.”

Lynne Poole, Head of Human Resources, Vimto

To find out more about Vimto, visit www.vimto.co.uk

To find out more about Nichols Plc, visit www.nicholsplc.co.uk