Only 42% of employees responded positively to the question: “I receive regular recognition or praise for doing my job well” in the firm’s second employee engagement survey — spurring action by Horwich Farrelly.

A legal firm of over 750 employees, Horwich Farrelly expanded by over 50% and spread across five sites, in only three years. A leading specialist provider of legal and handling services to the UK general insurance claims sector, Horwich Farrelly has always prided itself on putting its people first, winning an award for a revolutionary approach to performance management in Law and being marked as ‘One To Watch’ by Best Companies.

However, their rapid growth made it harder to retain the connection between management, senior partners and company as a whole, that had, until now, been very natural. The firm’s second annual engagement survey, in 2016, revealed that less than half of their people felt they were regularly recognised for a job well done.

The management acknowledged they still had a long way to go and that it was imperative to evolve their company’s culture and recognition in order to maintain the environment that had created this impressive rate of business growth. This led to reward and recognition becoming one of the seven key areas for the organisation to focus on.

During this time, Horwich Farrelly also launched their first set of corporate values. They were keen to discover a means for their employees to really live these values, to ensure that they helped shape the future of the organisation, becoming more than just ‘posters on the wall’.

"Company culture is fundamentally driven by the values of your brand; you're trying to create a connection between the brand and your people. The values of your people need to connect with the values of the company, to build a more emotional, as opposed to rational, relationship with the organisation. This is heavily influenced by the commitment of the leadership team to the values of the brand."

To scale a great company culture, it was identified that they would need to fundamentally change the actions of appreciation and recognition. This was achieved by creating visibility across the organisation and linking this recognition back to their 15 core behaviours, which were built out of the Horwich Farrelly Values & Competency framework. To achieve this, they sought out Mo — a fast growing engagement platform that prided itself on integrating their customisable and bespoke approach to the business objectives and cultural initiatives of the organisation.

Representing Horwich Farrelly, CSR Manager Eloise Sochanik and Luke Fisher, CEO at Mo, would help empower Horwich Farrelly’s people to drive a fresh and organic, cultural transformation.

Mo's vision is to help organisations create exceptional places to work, so that more people love their job. Through recognising sterling efforts, increasing company wide communication and putting an emphasis on company values, Mo weaves together, repairs and enhances the community’s culture. This makes the working life a more rewarding, encouraging and open place to be.

They provide real time, data driven analytics and feedback to help create positive action and are the only data driven solution tracking employee actions to company values.

Eloise and the firm were eager for Mo to understand the organisational structure, what a working day at the firm looked and felt like, and how recognition was given. An employee steering group was developed to give the personnel a voice in actively shaping the culture of the organisation.

After a successful day of workshops and meetings with HR, the leadership team, managing partners and the steering group, Mo were able to come away with a wealth of user stories and understanding that influenced not just the launch to Horwich Farrelly but impacted the launch process they would take forward to other clients.

Eloise and Mark Davies, Launch Manager at Mo, piloted a new means of launching the program — ‘Mo Champions’.

The new scheme led with peer recognition in order to build a culture of genuine appreciation before financial incentives were introduced. During the pilot, 53 volunteers not only trialled the system to feedback to the cooperative, but were the ones driving further adoption. Sharing messages outside of the test group would instantly invite their colleague to Mo. The exceptional advocacy of the Champions caused a viral adoption and by day two, the user base had grown by 45%. This also ensured that as the system reached all corners of the firm, it was already filled with great examples of recognition — facilitating knowledge sharing of how best to live the culture that was again rooted in the Mo Champions.

The marketing team at Horwich Farrelly prepared an exciting launch campaign featuring the managing partners and board. Introducing a more informal feel, it instantly humanised the managing partners and made them more visible; it also displayed their commitment to the program and created a sense of openness that was in line with the way that people wanted to ‘feel at work’.

The core of the marketing campaign, created by Scott Neal, Marketing Communications Manager for Horwich Farrelly, was a series of photographs featuring the partners, directors and other colleagues wearing a specially designed ‘ThanksBox Head’ (after all we did used to be called ThanksBox); these photos were advertised around the firm and on the day the platform officially launched, all employees received a box of co-branded chocolates.

"I'm really proud to have been part of the launch of Mo, which achieved 82% engagement within six months. It was challenging but great fun to be given the task of creating a launch campaign that enabled our 750 people to be recognised as consistently now, as when the firm was half size."

- Scott Neal, Marketing Communications Manager, Horwich Farrelly

It is important to note that material or monetary based rewards were not included in the program until five months after the system launch; this meant people were organically participating in the cultural shift and recognising one another without the knowledge of any incentive. The staff had bought into Mo, with the real tangible aim to improve recognition and culture amongst peers, before any regular cadence of rewards were brought in alongside it.

After the scheme had been firmly adopted throughout the organisation, and the content observed in Mo had reached a consistently high level of quality, it was time to introduce ‘Mo Thursdays’ — a monthly event bringing a series of fun rewards to the desks of the most outstanding colleagues. The managing partners personally reviewed all of the eligible recognition messages before announcing them to the firm and the rewards could be bottles of fizz, additional annual leave, chocolates or vouchers — a range of rewards to fit the needs of a diverse workforce. The act of delivering these rewards in person, created a fantastic buzz around the office every Mo Thursday.

Line managers saw how effective the new system was among different teams; they became more cohesive and the solicitors felt a higher level of recognition for their efforts. This encouraged management at all grades to become more involved, securing active participation throughout the company’s hierarchy.

The members had a new found voice, which was heard at all levels across Horwich Farrelly. By the end of the first month, the number of active users had increased by more than 300%. Since the launch in Jan 2017 usage steadily grew to 11,000 messages by the end of the year, with a consistent usage of around 92% across the whole year!

The Mo values analytics revealed: Being “A strong team player” is their most recognised behaviour. Their least recognised behaviour “Speaking up”, lead to plans in 2018 to launch Ideas as part of Mo to give employees a forum to speak up to improve the workplace.

With such wide adoption, the question remains: How do people feel? Has the culture and recognition improved? 

The data tells us; the most engaged employees, identified through Horwich Farrelly’s engagement survey a year after this initiative begun, were found to have sent twice as many messages as the least engaged departments.

Horwich Farrelly’s recent engagement survey revealed 68% of people agreed the new reward and recognition scheme has helped to create a more positive culture.

We talk to Mairi Probin who helped Iceland become Best Company (twice!)

In today’s modern working environment, companies that want to keep the best talent working on their brand, product or service, go out of their way to hire employees who fit their company culture and brand values. Or is it the other way around? Do they go out of their way to build a company culture and values around the talent they want to hire?

It doesn’t matter which way a company works, the important lesson is that cultural fit is an all-important requisite for today’s modern employee. Candidates are looking for organisations that don’t just offer a great salary and benefits like a health club membership and annual bonus. They are looking for a company that lets them experiment with innovation and creativity, doesn’t care about job titles and probably doesn’t concern themselves with where they work, as long as they achieve results. A company that believes in regular gratitude and appreciative feedback and not just from the top down, also from the bottom up.

Peer-to-peer recognition systems like Mo are an essential part of the feedback system in a modern organisation. Coworkers recognising each other’s work can be so much more rewarding and motivating than receiving a pat on the back from your line manager.

When your recruitment process concentrates on finding talent that fits your company culture, you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll have less staff turnover, better employee engagement, intrinsic motivation amongst teams and greater productivity.

So how do you find talent that fits with your company culture?

Firstly modern employees are looking for most, or all of the above from their employer. So if your culture doesn’t embrace flexibility, creativity and transparency, you’re unlikely to attract the hottest candidates on the block. You’re going to need a culture and values overhaul to match their expectations. Those companies who successfully put employee engagement and happiness at the top of their priorities are already on the fast track to recruiting great talent.

An interesting article written by Yay for Monday! creator, Sergey Kotlov, suggests that companies create Employee Personas. He suggests that companies select several employees who represent the identity and values of the organisation; interview them on their likes and dislikes and create a persona to look for in future candidates.

Richard Branson published an article on LinkedIn which explained why he recruits for personality, not skillset. He writes that if you get the perfect mix of people working for your company, you are more likely to enjoy success. Most skills can be learned, but you can’t train personality, so finding people who fit with your company culture and team values is the key to a winning team and successful brand.

Try combining Sergey Kotlov’s idea of creating an employee persona with identifying three core values that make up your company culture. Zappos online shoe store include, “Deliver WOW through service” within their core values, Google says, “Focus on the user and all else will follow” and Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts cite, “Supporting sustainability” as one of their core values.

You can see that core values are unique to a company’s product or service, so think about what matters to your business, what is the value of your service? What has got you where you are today, or will get you where you want to be in the future? And what social values are important to your organisation and the people that work in it?

Think about social justice and dignity, the worth of your employees and the importance of human relationship and happiness. These are the principles around which you can start to deliver your core values. It should never come down to money. It’s always about the people, whether those people are your clients or employees – ideally both, and also the environment in which we work.

Here’s a great exercise that will help you work out core values to look for when recruiting that perfect team. It gets coworkers involved in the process .

Ask each team member to share their top 5 core values for:

Now share the results for each grouping and identify those values, which have a stronger importance for team members. You can use these to analyse what values bring your team together and what they agree is important when it comes to working as a team and bringing on board a new team member who will fit in with the company culture. You can find more exercises and a downloadable version of the 250 core value sheet in this article on Value Exercises to Build Vision.

Another method of ensuring new recruits will fit with your company culture is to get your employees involved in the recruitment process itself. At Just Digital in Brazil they have a very unconventional, but successful hiring process. It doesn’t use a recruitment company and is not left to the HR department.

Their first step is to sit down and create a role around the needs of the organisation, or a current project that is missing resources. The whole team gets involved in sharing the role on their social channels and posting on job boards. When they have a good selection of candidate responses, all team members are invited to decide if they agree that a candidate should make it to the interview stage (at least two team members must agree). The team is then invited to take part in interviews. It makes a lot more sense to me that teams working together, should also take part in the decision process of choosing new members for that team. After all, they are the ones who are going to be working together.

Finally, why restrict your employees by giving them a job title? Today’s modern employee is looking for a role that she can grow into and make her own. Forward-thinking organisations understand that if they want teams to innovate, then boxing them into a job title isn’t the answer. The solution is to let their creativity and skills flow out of the box. Trust is a great factor in satisfying the modern employee. Organisations must give their employees enough flexibility to say, “hey, you know what you have to do, you know your objective, we trust you to make it happen using your skills and creativity in the way you wish.”

Let them experiment and they’ll find a greater sense of purpose within the organisation. Your company culture starts here and the best talent for your organisation will find you.

Mo is collaborating with a rapidly growing law firm, with multiple offices across the UK. The organisation has almost doubled in size in 3 years and it was time to formalise processes, boost the sense of involvement from employees and to retain their Best Companies to Work For title at scale.

A case study – how we continued to connect with our people while growing rapidly

A rapid increase in the number of employees meant starting to formalise the culture of recognition and aligning it with their values, which remain central to how they operate, was critical for this growing law firm.

When it came to implementing a solution they were keen for it to not feel like a management tool and instead for recognition to grow as an employee led initiative. This shaped an innovative approach to their launch – working with Mo to introduce to only a small group of employees, and then allowing employees to spread the word virally - by inviting their colleagues via a Thanks message.

Creating an inclusive culture that worked for all of the offices across the UK and allowing the managing partners to be present, even if not physically.

"I wanted to work with Mo due to the appeal of working with a smaller, more agile company who are growing their offering as we grow. They have allowed us to manage the cultural jump through the separation of rewards and recognition and a hands on launch process, helping us build the right initiative right from the beginning."

The organisation had grown significantly and the partners felt they were losing touch with what was happening in the business.

Messages can be shared with managers and the entire organisation, leader boards are available to show who is sending and receiving the most messages and what for. The Partners are using the information generated on Mo to highlight employee contribution and issuing rewards regularly for exceptional performance.

Not only are employees regularly being thanked for their efforts by their peers and management team, the leadership can see all of the great things that happen in the organisation every day.

The organisation were keen for recognition to remain genuine and not feel like a management mandate to use the tools. Mo designed a unique launch process - on boarding a steering group of select employees from across the business and all of the locations, helping shape to rollout plans and personalise the system. Employee’s felt like it was their project and were engaged in the success of the project.

The campaign was a great success and within a month there was a 500% increase in employees using Mo - a success that can be attributed to the understanding of culture and high levels of staff engagement amongst staff.

Mo collaborated with an international multi-brand hotel chain, and their partners to help create a consistent employee experience for colleagues across both the managed and franchised estates in Europe.

Since introducing Mo, the hotels saw a 32% improvement in levels of employee engagement and a 36% improvement in how well recognised our employee’s feel.

“Employee and General Manager feedback has been exceptional and we’ve seen particular success in the UK, Portugal and Russia.” Head of HR Operations

86% of franchise employees had signed up within a week and 6000 messages were sent within the first two weeks – “we always knew that every day employees were going above and beyond but it’s amazing for me and everyone else in the company to see just how much is happening”.

Amongst the 100+ hotels in Europe, many of the challenges were consistent: 

1. Boost employee engagement to improve business performance and guest experience

2. Reduce manual, time intensive processes

3. Create involvement in conversation from both head office and hotel colleagues

4. Demonstrate innovation, create efficiency and gain insights by using technology

Our Recognition tool allows for any employee to highlight the contribution of a colleague and share this with them, the management team or the entire organisation.

Hotel and Head Office staff would show their appreciation using recognition cards, hand written and pass it to their colleague or one of the management team in person when they had time. 

Over 16,000 messages have now been sent via the app and web, helping to boost the awareness of recognition with over 215,000 messages views and 22,000 reactions.

“I’ve been overwhelmed by the level of success, it’s great to see so much recognition happening across our business” Hotel Group Operations Manager

Both time and money have been saved - Mo presents all of the information required by the hotels, requiring no manual effort and the costs saved on printing pays for the service.

Our Rewards tool is a simple way to give digital rewards that are directly linked to behaviour. This can be used in combination with our Nominations tool, for example, allowing for employees to vote for employee of the month.

Hotel and Head Office staff would meet monthly and discuss between them who should receive monthly rewards.

Managers read through recognition messages of their team, and can issue instant rewards within their set budget. Not only does this help managers surface good behaviours but the rewards are directly linked to the actions. In addition to this, head office sends out a monthly survey asking employees to vote for their colleague of the month.

Time and money have been saved. Reward is more closely linked to behaviour and more democratic. Managers are enabled to reward their team directly, building stronger relationships. All the data is collected in our analytics tool so head office can understand how spend is distributed between hotels, job roles, pay grade, gender etc.

Our Ideas tool allows for any employee to propose organisational improvements, share it with their colleagues and have them vote on it to gather opinion rapidly – the topics employees are encouraged to focus on are aligned the KPIs of the hotels. Finally, allocated decision makers can then decide the outcome and communicate this to all employees via the app.

Employees had no clear process to submit their improvements, the hotels had tried physical suggestion boxes but had limited engagement.

Using Ideas, the hotels have received a tonne of great ideas, impacting guest experience, delivering cost savings and creating way to improve the workplace.

Within the first three months 31 ideas and process improvements were put forward gaining 430 votes, 19 of these were then accepted and implemented. It’s still early to judge but they believe the combined effect of these new initiatives could lead to a substantial increase in cost savings and profitability, creating an estimated return on investment of ~500%. Additionally, responses in our employee engagement survey asking employees if they felt like their voice was being heard went up by 34%.

“Mo Ideas is a game-changer, helping to surface great ideas from the frontline, gathering opinion and an understanding of impact quickly and delivering clear ROI.” Head of HR Operations

Anecdotally colleagues are so excited to have the opportunity to be involved in decisions by sharing their opinion along with a clear channel to feedback to the organisation all year round.

Our Analytics tool collates the data gathered from all of our tools, and presents it meaningful ways. We allow customers to import the data important to them, combine it with the activities on our system and use this to generate the reports that deliver real insights into organisational culture.

The corporate values of the hotels were intangible and hard to link to behaviour, they also had no means to measure or understand engagement in a real-time basis.

The Mo data analytics engine processes all of the messages and allows for the values and behaviours to visualised in a simple chart.

Each organisation can now understand from the data; how employees are living their values every day, which behaviours are regularly demonstrated and which groups or individuals are acting in the way that supports the organisations culture.

32% improvement in levels of employee engagement

36% improvement in how well recognised our employee’s feel

34% improvement in how well employees feel like their voice is heard

86% of people using the app within 1 week

“I’ve been really impressed how Mo have considered the commercial and people side of the business and not just built a tool for HR, helping us to have more meaningful conversations and truly engage with our teams throughout the organisation.“ Group Operations Manager

Mo collaborated with a leading retail and events business to help create a consistent employee experience and boost levels of employee engagement across the operation. As a direct result of creating a dedicated and accessible channel to connect with employees record number of nominations were received for the company’s annual awards. Managing the launch of Mo even won the HR team a prestigious Team of the Year award.

Mo collaborated with a leading retail and events business to help create a consistent employee experience and boost levels of employee engagement across the operation. As a direct result of creating a dedicated and accessible channel to connect with employees record number of nominations were received for the company’s annual awards. Managing the launch of Mo even won the HR team a prestigiousTeam of the Year award.

A case study – Boosting engagement and creating a consistent employee experience

With a small head office function serving the needs of nearly 1,000 employees across 6 separately branded businesses and geographical locations, some of which have grown organically and some who have been acquired, it was becoming very difficult to ensure a consistent culture was developing with the same benefits and opportunities for recognition open to all.  

1. Boost employee engagement to improve business performance and customer experience.

2. Reduce manual, time intensive processes and enable team managers to be more efficient while still regularly recognising and rewarding their teams.

3. Create ongoing and open communication between head office and front-line colleagues, when many were ‘in the field’ and not connected to any traditional business communication method.

4. Drive innovation and create efficiency from front-line employees on how the business can do better.

5. Create a consistent and measurable employee experience across all locations that represented the brand values and surfaced insights to head office.  

By using a combination of the Mo tools including; employee recognition, rewards, nominations and ideas, they were able to connect with employees who were previously uncontactable – all delivered via an intuitive app.

Our Recognition tool allows for any employee to highlight the contribution of a colleague and share this with them, the management team or the entire organisation.

The only form of recognition was a reward given by managers to their team. This hugely restricted the amount of recognition given as it was limited by job role and budget. In addition to this, head office had no understanding as to why people were being rewarded.

Reward and recognition are separated. All employees are able to recognise each other through our recognition tool. Head office has full visibility of everything.

Both time and money have been saved. Recognition is more democratic and can be given on the go, rather than just in the office. This also delivered a consistent and manageable cultural experience across all locations.

Our Rewards tool is a simple way to give digital rewards that are directly linked to behaviour. This can be used in combination with our Nominations tool, for example, allowing for all managers to vote for employee of the month.

Managers would hand out on the spot rewards tokens, employees would then have to go to head office to exchange the reward token for a high street voucher. Admin pressure meant these were often not given or redeemed.

Central management of budget and reward relied on managers logging the manual process leading to an inevitable lack of visibility. They also had a nomination process, asking a staff council of fives representatives across the business who their star of the month was.

Managers issue on the spot rewards using the Mo app, the employee can choose to save up their balance or redeem these instantly, getting a high street voucher emailed to them.

For nominations, they now send a digital survey to all the team leaders throughout the organisation asking them to nominate their Star of the Month. HR in head office then award £150 voucher for the most popular nomination.

Both time and money have been saved, for both the company and the employees. In addition to this, they monitor all the reward spend through ourAnalytics tool, ensuring budgets are kept to and diversity targets are met. The whole process is more democratic and the staff say they feel like they have more input in the process.

The Ideas tool allows for any employee to post an idea or suggested improvements, share it with their colleagues and have them vote on it to gather opinion rapidly – the topics employees are encouraged to focus on are aligned the KPIs. Finally, allocated decision makers can then decide the outcome and communicate this to all employees via the app.

An employee forum was used to capture ideas but expected people to be there in person and to have spoken to colleagues before attending, which rarely happened. 

Using Ideas, the management and HR teams, along with employee representative group can see suggested improvements to the company and the workplace. Impact can be assessed on all employees, across different locations through the voting mechanism and a decision can be clearly communicated to all via the app.

A much more inclusive culture is created, with all employees now able to contribute and participate to making the organisation a better place. Return on investment is expected with ideas to make money, save money and creative efficiency, all shared via the app.

Our Analytics tool collates the data gathered from all of our tools, and presents it meaningful ways. We allow customers to import the data important to them, combine it with the activities on our system and use this to generate the reports that deliver real insights into organisational culture.

There was limited or solely perceptive understanding of what was happening in the organisation, how initiatives were affecting engagement and how much Return On Investment was generated.

The Mo data analytics engine processes all activities on the services, allowing for contribution to be evaluated by demographic or diversity grouping criteria or against employee performance or talent data. The organisation is also able to understand which of their values are most lived and which behaviours are dominant from the cultural framework.

Welcome to the Mo blog. A place to learn more about the world of work. We will share our stories from the trenches, insight from the wider world and feature some exciting people challenging the way we all look at what motivates people in work. 

Through stunning design and storytelling they were able to give their brand a spirit. Today this is known as the Culture Manual.

Our new podcast about work is here! First up is Bruce Daisley, No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller with: The Joy of Work.

We can finally tell you all about it.... ThanksBox is now Mo. Learn why we're now called Mo and what we're all about from Luke, our CEO.

Case Studies

Scaling Culture at Horwich Farrelly

Steve Wikeley

More Case Studies

Scaling Culture at Horwich Farrelly

Scaling Culture at Horwich Farrelly

Only 42% of employees responded positively to the question: “I receive regular recognition or praise...

Company culture and the modern employee

Company culture and the modern employee

We talk to Mairi Probin who helped Iceland become Best Company (twice!)

We talk to Mairi Probin who helped Iceland become Best Company (twice!)

Employee Engagement in a Legal Firm

Employee Engagement in a Legal Firm

Mo is collaborating with a rapidly growing law firm, with multiple offices across the UK. The organi...

Employee Engagement in Hotels

Employee Engagement in Hotels

Mo collaborated with an international multi-brand hotel chain, and their partners to help create a c...

Engagement with a distributed workforce

Engagement with a distributed workforce

Mo collaborated with a leading retail and events business to help create a consistent employee exper...

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