My name is Clair Staines and I am the Chief People Officer at POWWR. I bring over 20 years of experience in HR with a strong track record of driving cultural transformation and employee engagement. I have worked across a variety of sectors, which I believe gives me a practical cross-industry perspective of what truly drives performance and well-being. Since joining POWWR over two years ago, I focused on strengthening the heart of the business, which I really believe is our people. I'm passionate about career development and an advocate for progression opportunities that allow employees to thrive and shine.
My interest in this particular topic, which is building employee engagement, really sparked during a period of organisational change. I saw firsthand how transparent communication and listening to employees transformed uncertainty into trust and collaboration. And those moments reinforced for me that engagement isn't just a metric, it's a lived experience. And if you get it right, can build performance and the outcomes for any business.
Today, I want to share a practical story about engagement, how measuring it regularly, sharing openly with the wider business, and acting turned engagement from a campaign into a way of working. So to give you the full picture, POWWR, the company I work for, was originally two businesses that merged together, one in the US and one in the UK. These businesses had completely different ways of working. They had different leaders, they had different cultures, and they had different understandings of what actual performance and engagement actually stood for. Unfortunately, in 2023, before I joined POWWR, it went through two rounds of redundancies. And in March of 2023, they took a pulse of their employees. The EMPS score was at minus 22 and their engagement score was at 55%. And I believe this engagement work and this study surfaced a clear message. Loyalty was below target. People wanted few surprises. They wanted more transparency and stronger connections across what we call the pond between the US and the UK. It wasn't that our people were necessarily disengaged. They really genuinely cared about the business. But there was a massive gap between what the leaders of the business thought was happening and what their employees were telling me at that point. So what we had to do, in short, was tighten that loop. We needed to listen, we needed to act, and we needed to be visible so our employees could see quick changes and that they were heard and we were acting upon what they were telling us.
So I approached it with six key areas. So first and foremost, it seems very simple, but we redefined and we worked on every single person's role and responsibilities. We explained to them what they should be doing on a day-to-day basis and what clarity looked like for them and what their next roles would look like too. The second point, rather than focusing on the end goal, we looked at and we called them OKRs, so objective and key results. And we aligned that to the overall business objectives, but then we broke that down as well. It wasn't that we just gave people objectives and off they went and they had to do it. If someone was motivated by achievement, we would give them objectives that we knew they would get four or five of them every single quarter. If they liked that stretch goal and they really wanted to strive, we would give them three ones that we knew they would achieve, but that four and five, they would be ones that they would really have to put in the effort to achieve. Out of those OKRs, we would always ensure that one of them was linked to learning as well, because part of building a high performing organisation is making sure that people evolve and that people have a really good learning journey.
The next piece that we looked at was around career pathway and job levelling once. we got our people to understand what their role was and what their responsibilities were, what they were achieving every single quarter. We could then start to look at how they could build their careers here with us. So we introduced Career Catalyst, and that was our career pathway and job leveling framework. It all linked to our new values, which were super, so it links to superpower, which stands for spark, unite, positive, execute and respect. So these values came from my kind of tour around different areas. It wasn't just about showing up, it was about displaying those values and those values then underpinned everything that we did moving forward.
What was next for me was the leadership and how our leadership then engaged with our people. And we created Momentum. So Momentum was a framework, so because we are a remote first business and we had people both in the UK managing people in the US, people in the US managing people in the UK, we wanted to build that bridge between the two businesses and the two different organisations. So we were quite prescriptive with what we expected from our leaders. So we expected that they had a minimum weekly conversation with their teams, that they had a monthly, more in-depth, hey, do you know what? How are you doing? How are you OKRs? Is there any blockades, any barriers that you want us to break down? How are you doing? Is there going to be something that's stopping you from achieving? Do you need any support? So those type of meetings, and then on a quarterly basis, it was about reviewing the previous quarter's OKRs and focusing on the next.
What that did was that set a foundation so every single person was treated exactly the same way. So it didn't make a difference if you were our receptionist in our office in Manchester or if you were the CTO over in the US, every single layer of management had exactly the same weight and approach and that every single person in this business knew what they were doing and how their turning up to work actually made a difference to our overall objectives.
So from there, what we felt was important is that all of these things were working and it was great and it was in the background. But how were we connecting all of the different teams and all the different people? So we introduced what we called All Hands. All Hands were our monthly bringing everybody together. We expected cameras on, especially from leadership, so people could see your faces, people could engage with your face, they could see your body language. And we had a set theme for these All Hands. So we talked about our business OKRs, how each team were performing. We talked about anniversaries and thanked people. We talked about promotions, and we had our, what we called our supers, so people that really stood out. And we asked other people to put other people forward. And that divide between the UK and the US was becoming smaller and smaller, and people were starting to become one organisation.
And then the final piece was around our rewards and our compensation. So I'm truly not a, it's just about the base salary. It's about everything that comes along with that. So I'm a huge believer in financial wellbeing and I feel that that's a huge pillar in any strategy or any organisation because you can't keep up with inflation and cost-of-living. So we asked our people in a completely different survey, utilising STRIDE, what it was that they felt they wanted part of their package, what would make a difference to them. So When we introduced all of these things and along the way in our All Hands, we shared what we were doing. We measured our engagement scores. So originally in March 2023, there were minus 20 and 55%. In September 2023, the EMPS was 12 with an engagement of 75%. Skip through to April of 2024, that went up to an EMPS of 44 and our engagement at 82%. And now, our ENPS sits at 52% with our engagement at 87%. For those of you who look to measure engagement and timelines, I would always look for a participation level as well, a score of over 80%. So for us, we're quite fortunate in the fact that our engagement scores have been, and what I mean by that is people that participate has been over 85, with sometimes being 92%. So again, I feel that that's a metric of how engaged our workforce are, because they're not going to want to share with you their thoughts or their feedback if you're not listening and you're not acting upon it.
So overall, where we are now, we have a real resilient atmosphere and I feel that people trust us and people share their communications with us and share what their thoughts are. We have a great retention rate. So anyone who is unhappy, I feel has that path to their manager or to us as a HR team before they would do anything. I feel that if there is a concern, people are very vocal about that, either in the All Hands or with their manager. And I feel that our engagement is definitely linked to our performance.
So final thoughts, really, I would say don't see this as just a project. It has to be part of your strategy. It can't be something that's standalone. I would say measure it and measure it regularly. It doesn't have to be in-depth. If you're going to do something, act visibly and quickly and tell people what has changed. So you told us this, is what we've done. And there's a variety of different ways that you can do that. And when it comes to overall anything that you do on a bigger piece, make sure it's fair and make sure it's transparent. So my reflective question is, when have you felt the most engaged at work and what made that possible? And are you actually putting that into practice in your organisation?
