

When we caught up with David Hancock, he had just taken the reins at Monkey Puzzle, a collection of nurseries that care for children across the UK. He had already headed two other nursery groups, iStep and Children1st and improved staff retention across his childcare workforce.
In this article, we’ll explore the challenges facing the sector and how Mo’s employee recognition platform brought staff turnover “to a halt” across David’s teams.
Before we get into David’s story at iStep, some background: this sector has faced vast challenges, not least from increased demand and changes in work patterns. But while nurseries are a vital part of the childcare system, they often receive little support to tackle such challenges.
David’s latest team at Monkey Puzzle is full of passionate employees who just want to feel like they are part of something meaningful. They face similar challenges to his previous workforce at iStep. Even staff who have a long tenure begin to feel disengaged in these circumstances.
“I’ve been hearing this for twenty years: the childcare sector is fragmented,” David explained to our CEO, Luke Fisher. “What happens when the head of a nursery that feels more like a family decides to sell? Some staff will feel like they’ve lost that personal connection… how do we support them?”
Throw a leadership change into the mix and things reach an inflection point. Will the team come together to succeed? This is the story of how Mo helped iStep bring their whole company together with an effective recognition platform and improved staff retention.
A Fresh Start For iStep Nurseries
In early 2022, the nursery sector was facing real challenges related to high staff turnover, employee disengagement and ineffective communication. People wanted jobs that felt them feeling valued. The opposite was true: many left work feeling tired and demotivated.
To make things harder for the team at iStep Nurseries, this family-run business was changing hands from its original owner to a new set of hands. David knew that his so-called “corporate” culture may lead to friction among employees, who were used to a “family-run” approach. Not only did he not want to alienate his hard-working staff, he was concerned about resulting inefficiencies in their children’s care.
Direct feedback from employees highlighted these issues; David, who has been the Managing Director of several nursery groups, knew that something had to be done about these growing concerns. He realised that centralised software could solve these issues and make his new staff feel truly informed and appreciated in the process.
David’s staff retention challenges:
- Many nursery staff work part-time
- Some employees don’t read notices in the staff room
- Communication was poor
- They struggled to ask some staff even to fill out a survey
- A salary raise had a small impact on attrition, but not enough
- Staff turnover remained high
- Using agency staff is more expensive and the care is less consistent
This is the picture that David painted for us during his first conversation with Mo. He wanted his leadership to mark a transition from old challenges into a new world where all of his staff felt valued, motivated and supported. He wanted to reduce attrition and improve the overall experience for the children and their parents.

Mo Was the Best Solution for David’s Challenges
While the ask sounded big, we knew that the right engagement strategy could make it happen. Our experts at Mo worked with David to customise the perfect platform for his company culture, combining employee recognition, staff rewards and a centralised employee communication feed. The strategy was designed to empower his people for success by making them feel seen and connected — no matter which nursery they worked in.
While better retention was the goal, the real solution was creating a real sense of community. To explain how we achieved this together, we’re taking you back to the beginning of the journey. We’ll outline David’s needs, the solutions we found to support his teams, as well as the incredible outcomes.
Step One: The Director Takes Action
Through a recommendation by a trusted colleague, David discovered Mo. We’re an employee engagement and recognition software that specialises in improving company culture among distributed or remote teams. For David, it felt like a no-brainer.
Mo offered a way to maintain personal connections, deliver positive messages from leadership and celebrate employee milestones. The goal was to implement Mo along with a Reward program to boost motivation.
How did David get stakeholders onboard?
- The next step involved evaluating Mo’s features, aligning them with the nursery’s operational needs and securing stakeholder approval.
- David convinced stakeholders by demonstrating the potential financial benefits of reduced staff turnover and improved employee satisfaction.
- Mo effectively solved several challenges, including communication breakdowns and low employee engagement, while significantly reducing attrition.
Step Two: Making the Transition
The transition to Mo began in mid-2022. Our Customer Success manager Kim coordinated their onboarding over approximately two months and helped David establish a pattern of posting every day in his company feed.
Mo provides onboarding resources, training guides and in-house support as standard. And we never surprise our customers with implementation or reward fees — which David was very grateful about.
David and his team led the introduction of Mo to managers and employees. They conducted meetings and workshops to explain our platform’s benefits and functionalities, ensuring a real understanding of what the whole team was trying to achieve. This approach meant that adoption was almost immediate, a sure sign that success is on the horizon.
The key to success, in David’s opinion, was to only post positive things in the platform. People want to feel motivated, not demoralised. Difficult or constructive conversations are best had in person; regular recongition, on the other hand, should be delivered instantaneously and centrally, where it is most visible. This tactic helped the whole team turbo-charge adoption after implementing Mo.
Step Three: First Sign of Progress
By late 2022, the first benefits of using Mo became apparent. After only three months, David was already impressed by the decrease in staff turnover and the positive feedback from employees regarding improved communication. His teams, many of whom had been at Monkey Puzzle for years, were thrilled with the regular recognition and rewards that they recieved on Mo, and were all praise for David’s leadership.
David has reason to be hopeful for real change at his most recent nursery, Monkey Puzzle. At iStep — and then later, at Children1st — the introduction of Mo created a true cultural shift. After using Mo almost every day, David saw staff turnover “almost grind to a halt.” Even without rewards, the platform was a “game-changer.”
Step Four: Improving Staff Retention
Since the adoption of Mo, iStep and Children1st have achieved some impressive milestones. Their employee engagement has skyrocketed and they’ve seen remarkable improvements in workplace satisfaction. Childcare staff retention has also significantly improved, with turnover coming down to almost zero within six months. This change has led to cost savings and, most importantly, more consistent care for the children.
To recap, David’s team incorporated three solutions into their Mo platform:
- Moments — to improve communication and connection
- Recognition — to enhance feelings of motivation and loyalty
- Rewards — to ensure their people feel valued for hard work
The idea of Moments is they go beyond wishing an employee a happy birthday or work anniversary. They’re a way for employees to share more of themselves at work, to create more genuine bonds with their coworkers and to shout out the great work they see in their teams every day.
Engagement with Moments is one of the key ways for an organisation to measure the success of the Mo platform, and Boosts mean your managers can do more to take control of that engagement. You can also limit Boosts to particular audiences, making them a way to either make company-wide announcements or deliver updates only to relevant teams.
Step Five: A Lasting Cultural Shift
As Managing Director, David has brought Mo into his latest role at Monkey Puzzle. The nursery group will undergo a substantial cultural transformation in the coming few years. At iStep and Children1st, employee engagement and retention have improved, helping to shape a more connected work environment through Moments, Rewards and Boosts.
Despite the acquisition, David has seen evidence that iStep still feels like a “family”. Mo’s positive messaging and recognition capabilities have strengthened the bond between employees and leadership, creating a supportive and motivated workforce.
David has been able to prove the value of his initiative to stakeholders because it remains cheaper to retain people with Mo than pay twice the amount per hire for an agency employee. Since they don’t know the children, the quality of the care has also improved. Mo is a win for everyone.
Today: Going Even Further
Monkey Puzzle has started its journey with Mo and David is even expanding the use of the platform to other nurseries in his remit. We have continued to refine their reward and recognition strategy to have maximum impact on the lives of his hard-working staff. David has become a real champion of what we do here at Mo, and we’re delighted to have his support.
In the future, we hope to add even more prompts and analytics features to support David’s managers in their efforts to engage all staff — from tenured workers to new employees.
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Mo Improves Staff Retention in Childcare
Mo is a culture and engagement platform that uses data insights to drive real improvement in engagement scores while reducing staff turnover. We strategically help people teams create great places to work through continuous, positive action.
To take action on measuring employee engagement, learn more about how to shift the dial at the manager level and transform insights into action. To find out if you’re eligible for our money-back guarantee, book a demo with our team.
If you’ve been inspired by this story and want to drive down your employee turnover rates too, arrange a call with our experts. We’re here to listen to your goals and work out a strategy that works for your company.