Discovery is a Great Place to Work

Chris Best, Discovery HR Director

Discovery’s HR Director, Chris Best, blogs about our official accreditation as one of the UK’s Best Workplaces.

As I hope you will have seen, Dimensions has been accredited as one of the UK’s Best Workplaces by the Great Place to Work Institute for the third year in a row. What’s more, this is the first year that the accreditation includes Discovery, and I am absolutely delighted that we have received this accolade. It is a wonderful recognition of our hard work after a very challenging period for everyone.

There were some very positive results from the survey regarding engagement and fair treatment in Discovery, with 86% of our colleagues agreeing that it is a welcoming organisation to join and 87% saying that their work is more than ‘just a job’. Up to 94% of colleagues (and no fewer than 85%) agreed that people are treated fairly here, when considering gender, beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, age, race or ethnic origin.

Less positively, we can see that the response rates for the survey in Discovery were low compared to the rest of the Dimensions Group – disappointingly, only around 10% of non-managers took part – and this is something we will be discussing with colleagues, as well as the topics that scored negatively. We are planning ‘deep-dive’ discussions into three key areas: work-life balance, management involving team members in decision-making, and management seeking and responding to suggestions and ideas. We would like to improve in these areas and will be asking colleagues how we can do better, including at our Discovery Colleague Voice forums.

Of course, the Great Place to Work survey itself was an opportunity for colleagues to make their feelings known and to influence decision-making, so it remains really important for everyone to feel they can make their views known. Remember that you can also submit ideas to the suggestions forum on the intranet and participate in Coffee with Steve (Scown, the Chief Executive of Dimensions) sessions, alongside colleagues from across the Dimensions Group.