Cumberland among best 100 companies to work for

The Cumberland is one of the 100 best companies to work for in the country.

The Cumbria-based building society has been ranked 96 in a league table of larger firms employing 250 to 1,000 people. The survey is carried out each quarter by Best Companies which measures workplace engagement. The Cumberland has been taking part for four years and this is the first time it has broken into the top 100.

For the north-west it is ranked in the top 75 of all companies and among financial services organisations it is rated among the best 25. Andrew Tait, internal communications partner at The Cumberland, said: “It tells us that The Cumberland is getting a lot of things right in the eyes of its people.

“So it’s an endorsement by our own people about the things that we are achieving and the way that we are managing the organisation. It tells us that people have bought into the purpose and direction of the organisation. and they are proud to work for us. They feel part of the organisation,they feel as though they are making a positive contribution. That’s really important.”

Mr Tait said the results reflected the proactive work The Cumberland had done during Covid-19 and the lockdowns. “We’ve been taking account of what people have told us in the previous years and we’ve been focussed on some of the areas that they’ve told us we need to.We focussed very much on wellbeing during the pandemic and that’s reflected in the six per cent increase in that criteria.

“We depended heavily, because we were remote working, on people managers to care for and listen to and manage their staff remotely.

“We spent a lot of time and effort on training our managers and developing our managers through things like The Cumberland Managers’ Programme and the power hours etc, and preparing our managers for managing in a hybrid working environment as we moved out of the pandemic.

“The areas where we’ve perhaps seen a slight downturn in our scores are around things like community work and charity - because nobody was able to go out and do any voluntary work. We provide every employee with a day’s paid volunteering and our staff were not able to use that. We are now working hard to resurrect that and promote it more over the next year.”

Best Companies also rate organisations from one to three stars on an accreditation scale. Having previously been a ‘one to watch’ company, The Cumberland now has a one-star ‘Very Good To Work For’ rating and is just one per cent below two stars.

Mr Tait added: “We are quite disappointed that we haven’t managed to get over that threshold into two stars. But achieving a ranking in the top 100 has compensated for that. Our aim is to get into that two-star category at least next time round. However, the reason for us doing the survey is not to chase rankings.

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily

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