The Opportunity Group

About The Opportunity Group

The Opportunity Group is an apprenticeship company with the motto “talent is distributed evenly but opportunity is not.” They work with organisations of all sizes and in all sectors, to maximise their apprenticeships and ensure that emerging talent is ready for the future of work.

Introduction

The business has a fully remote working model that allows them to attract a wider pool of talent and grow quickly. At the same time, this has brought challenges around things like appreciation and reward, as Digital Programme Manager Gemma Wells explains.

“When you're in an office it’s very easy to share feedback and rewards. You can almost have a benefits package that fits the area you are in. When you go remote in the way we have, we’re all quite spread out.”

With this in mind, The Opportunity Group turned to Perkbox’s global platform, which allows businesses with diverse and dispersed workforces to provide something for everyone.

“The challenge was to find a really good benefits package that would reward people consistently and would suit everybody’s likes and needs, based on where they were. It was really difficult to do that before Perkbox.”

Using reward and recognition to pump up their people

One of The Opportunity Group’s core values is ‘One Team’, and they’re passionate about using appreciation and recognition to emphasise that value. To this end, Celebration hub has been a key tool in their employee engagement armoury. Gemma and her team encourage everybody to send recognitions, and then showcase this at the end of each week. Over 300 recognitions were sent within the first year and it’s had a visible impact on morale.

“We massively use Celebration hub. [It’s] probably been the most impactful part of Perkbox for us. It makes us end the week on a high. When you can see your name tagged in that feedback, or you can read all of the feedback that’s been shared for other people in the company, you feel quite pumped about all the good things going on. Just to see that round-up of all the positive feedback at the end of the week is such a nice feeling.”

Just as important as recognition is the ability to complement it with meaningful rewards. Perkbox’s recently launched Global Reward tool — a world first — has made this possible, while making the process of managing budgets more simple. Administrators simply allocate reward points to managers, who can give these to their team members as and when they see fit.

“We’ll definitely utilise the Reward points more, now that budgets are set for the team managers. We can set those budgets for team managers and the rewards will start to be shared more frequently. It allows them to have that freedom to reward their teams as well.”

Employees also get freedom, as they have the choice of what to spend their Reward points on — opting for anything from a meal delivery service to an exercise class.

The same concept applies on Perks hub, with every employee at The Opportunity Group getting Flexi points. These can then be spent on a range of Flexi Perks, something Gemma said employees “jumped on straight away.” She adds:

“They liked the freedom of Flexi Perks. It’s made it more open to everybody and they can see more benefits in tune with what they like. We’ve had a lot of feedback on how good that is.”

Part of the everyday culture

At Perkbox, we don’t just give you an all-in-one app and leave you to it. We keep going the distance for our customers — providing ongoing engagement assistance, while the platform itself is regularly updated.

This includes adding new discounts on Perks hub — which has seen The Opportunity Group’s employees save thousands within their first year — and a constantly growing library of wellbeing content on Wellness hub. This is something Gemma and her team highly value.

“I take a look at the engagement assets and the monthly calendars quite frequently and it helps us shape what we’re promoting, alongside the extra bits we’re doing at the company as well. We’ve also started to utilise Wellness hub…We’ve done lunchtime workouts for people, we’ve promoted the mindfulness webinars, and promoted them around times like Mental Health Awareness Week as well. We want to promote a healthy culture across our team.

Keeping company values front and centre

Another challenge with dispersed workforces is ensuring everyone is aware of important information and principles, such as values and objectives. Often, remote workers can feel more out of the loop than those at HQ.

The Opportunity Group were fully aware of this and have used various elements of the Perkbox platform to help.

“It has been a challenge to make sure everybody’s engaged and seeing the different things going on. We’ve used Culture hub to promote things — like the EAP benefit we have, and just sharing our values and making them more prominent.

The biggest feedback we get is they love Celebration hub. [It’s] something easy to jump on and shout about — and we can link it to our values as well so we know they’re prominent in everyone’s minds.”

Communicate, collaborate and celebrate

Perkbox is a major part of The Opportunity Group’s day-to-day employee offering, as demonstrated by a 97% activation rate. The platform has also been used to attract new talent, with Gemma stating that it’s utilised in the “interview process and even in the adverts for any job roles we put out there.”

Ultimately, the more dispersed workforces become, the more important culture and communications will be — both to keep existing employees happy, and to attract a candidate base that’s highly in demand. It’s something The Opportunity Group put at the heart of everything they do, and we’re happy to play our part in this.

“Since implementing Perkbox, it’s definitely created more of a structure around how we can communicate things. We can create a bit more engagement around the comms we send out and it encourages collaboration and celebration a lot more. It’s definitely helped strengthen our culture.”