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Through our partnership here at L&G Group Protection with Fruitful Insights, we’re working with SME clients and their intermediaries to turn insight into action and make employee wellbeing a business priority. This is about helping businesses unearth the drivers of impaired wellbeing in their specific organisations; to identify, on an ongoing basis, what’s working and what isn’t in terms of benefits and culture.
The goal is to help SMEs put wellbeing at the heart of business success, informing everything from changes and additions to employee benefit programmes, to organisational culture – guiding strategic intent, employee engagement and leadership development.
This kind of consultancy represents a big evolution for our industry, an industry that’s very used to playing in its own ‘product focused’ lane. But it’s what employers want and need from us.
So, what does it look like in practice? L&G and Fruitful Insights recently brought together various SME representatives as part of a roundtable, to share challenges and best practice. Here, we shine a spotlight on LAH Property Marketing.
Case study: LAH Property Marketing
Founded around 30 years ago, LAH Property Marketing is a family-run business, which provides “property-savvy, front of house reception” for office buildings across the UK.
They have around 300 employees; 30 of whom work in their Croydon-based head office and everyone else placed in front of house receptionist roles for client companies nationally.
Fruitful Insights has worked with LAH for the past three years, providing business-specific data and insights, helping to not only shape their employee benefits programme, but also their culture, brand and reputation. In the process, reducing absence, improving recruitment and bolstering their new client business and retention strategies.
Stuart McLennan, Director of LAH, says: “Our head office has a very family feel. But most of our employees are working in front of house receptionist roles nationally, so they’re effectively working remotely, away from the head office culture. One of our top challenges is trying to ensure our culture is felt by everyone.
“We see high turnover. People are typically in this kind of role for around 18 months. A lot of our employees are those returning to work after having children or juggling other caring responsibilities with work. Also, people studying and working part-time. By nature, it’s a very transitional job, but that doesn’t mean that for the period of time they’re with us, our people shouldn’t have a really positive experience.”
From ‘finger in the air’ to informed and outcomes-focused
Stuart explains that LAH has always done lots of positive things – in terms of culture and wellbeing – but in “a scattergun approach”. And they felt they weren’t very good at joining the dots.
He adds: “Working with Fruitful has allowed us to hold a mirror up to ourselves to say, ‘OK we do all these great things, but how do we communicate that to our colleagues? And how do we align all that with our people and business outcomes’.
“Looking at this through a commercial lens, we see employee wellbeing as an opportunity to influence building managers in places where our front of house people work. These managers often look after other buildings too and if our employees – and the support we give to them – shines through, they’re more likely to say to other potential clients, ‘LAH are great, let’s get their people in our other buildings too.
“Our front of house reception teams are our best advocates, because they’re sat in front of all our clients. Therefore, there’s an opportunity to influence decision makers across the market. Our staff in these roles often get poached by the managing agencies. It would be all too easy to see this as a negative, but it needn’t be – if we’ve done things right by them, they’ll continue to be our advocates while they’re working for our client companies.
“The wellbeing of our staff is always asked about in new business pitches. Price is rarely mentioned at all, because the price point is very similar across our competitors. This means that differentiation is key.”
Working with Fruitful helped LAH understand and strengthen those points of differentiation. It has also helped them identify gaps in employee support which, when filled, have helped reduce absence.
Stuart adds: “Our work with Fruitful has helped show us that little things can make a big difference. For example, our first year’s survey with Fruitful highlighted an employee pressure point around taking time out for GP appointments. This prompted us to add a Virtual GP to our benefits programme and it’s made an enormous difference.
“We can see the impact on absence rates over the last couple of years, thanks to changes like this, alongside joining the dots and improving employee communication.”
The data and insights have also informed broader aspects at LAH, in terms of culture and reputation.
“Prioritising the wellbeing of our people is part of our DNA. But we didn’t realise it was until we started working with Fruitful. Prior to this, it was all a bit ‘finger in the air’!
Stuart also highlights the importance of using a third-party, like Fruitful, to carry out the employee survey. “It adds weight and trust. It says to our people that this isn’t just a tick-box exercise. And the independent insight we’ve achieved on the back of this is hugely valuable. We even summarise the survey findings on our website; in the form of word clouds to communicate how our people feel about the business. The recruitment team really like this, and it’s often raised in interviews. It makes a big difference.”
Public reporting on wellbeing speaks volumes to employees & customers
LAH was recently awarded Fruitful Insights’ Workplace Accreditation, having seen its Wellbeing Maturity Index score increasing from 60% to 82% since 2023, with marked improvements in absence rates contributing to improved productivity outcomes.
Mike Tyler, Co-Founder and Chairman of Fruitful Insights, says: “This score puts LAH in the top 10% of our clients. The Workplace Accreditation – our newly developed standard – helps communicate, internally and externally, the great support and improvements a company is making. It says to employees and customers that wellbeing is front and centre.
“The first evidence, based on causation as opposed to just correlation, is now available to show that when organisations publicly demonstrate they’re measuring wellbeing – and getting average or above average scores – this increases the probability of people applying for available positions by 14.2%. This is so important for organisations in a competitive market, like LAH’s.”
By Colin Fitzgerald, Distribution Director – Group Protection, L&G
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