Understanding employee experience at Kensington Mortgages

Solution:

Significant changes in leadership and organisational direction

Result:

Use surveys to get employees views on cultural change, key challenge areas uncovered to tackle locally

Challenge

Gauging employee experience

Kensington is the UK’s leading non-bank specialist mortgage lender. They started working with ETS in 2018. Kensington had undergone some significant changes in leadership and organisational direction. Their first priority was to run an all-employee engagement survey that enabled them to understand employees’ current feelings about their experience of working at the company. Richard Nightingale, HR Director at Kensington, explains more: “Since that initial survey our objectives have evolved. Our aim is now to use surveys to gauge how organisational and cultural change is being experienced by employees and to identify areas where we still need to improve.”

Solution

Measuring drivers of enablement and empowerment

ETS has provided comprehensive, end-to-end support to Kensington, helping them with everything from questionnaire design, running the survey and reporting platforms and, lastly, with consultancy expertise to help understand business results, diagnose key development areas and guide action planning.

The programmes have been run in a very collaborative way with the ETS consultants working closely with the Kensington team.

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So far there has been two annual surveys undertaken, each going out to their employee population of 500 people. Each has seen a good response rate in excess of 80%. And, most importantly, using the EX3 model to measure drivers of enablement and empowerment alongside engagement is giving them a clear diagnostic reading on the areas they must focus on to improve their employee experience.

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Result

Focussing locally on key challenge areas

Kensington has used their survey results at a job function level, enabling teams to focus locally on the key challenge areas for them. This has included things like employees’ perceptions of compensation and reward, cross functional collaboration, ensuring people have access to the right tools and resources and simplifying processes. Richard Nightingale explains how they’ve found the experience of partnering with ETS: “We selected ETS because of their expertise, openness and collaborative approach. Their team has been really supportive and ensured we always stayed on track whilst also being flexible in adapting to new requirements. They’ve challenged our thinking and ensured we ask questions that will give a deep understanding of our organisational culture.”

Summary

Business Impact

Significant improvements in how employees feel our values are demonstrated, customer focus, seeking feedback about our service, how supported employees feel to do their job and confidence in action being taken on the survey.

Significant improvements in customer focus and seeking feedback about our service.

Significant improvements in how supported employees feel to do their job and confidence in action being taken on the survey.

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Case study