How autonomy is transforming loveholidays
At loveholidays, we acknowledge our success is linked to employee engagement and the important role autonomy plays in getting it right
Written by Jo Gostling and Michael Jones
At loveholidays, we recognise the important role that employee engagement plays in our success. It’s something we have been working especially hard to get right over the last three years and we have a goal to be recognised for it externally by winning a coveted Employer of Choice Award.
A key principle in the approach we are taking to employee engagement is autonomy — creating the opportunity for people to do the right thing to make the company better. Our aim is to allow individuals to utilise their passion, expertise and skills within an organisational structure that offers the chance to make a difference. It is predicated on the idea that our growth will not come from centralised control but in effective distribution of responsibility to experts in the business.
So far, we’re pleased to say this approach is working and has had an undeniably positive commercial impact on the business. Along the way, our teams have delivered innovative solutions to customer problems, pushed the boundaries of what’s possible and built award-winning capabilities. These changes have been absolutely fundamental to how we have bounced back after Covid-19.
What has been inspiring to see is how this same passion and creativity is also being used to transform the experience of working here. Both by ensuring that engagement is seen as a key focus and emphasising autonomy, people from all levels of the business have taken the initiative to create a better environment for everyone.
Making people a priority
Three years ago when we started to deliberately scale the business, we introduced OKRs as a way of bringing a clearer sense of direction and helping to create a shared consciousness. It’s important to us that the same level of thought and effort is given to improving the experience of working here as it is for helping the business succeed commercially. So from the start, we have made sure that our “people’’ goals are represented at the highest level, right alongside our business objectives.
This resulted in an ongoing “scaling” objective which, each quarter, focuses on an area that needs improvement: from onboarding to reward, employer brand to team structures and process changes. Simply put, the objective ensures we communicate succinctly what we are working on, why it’s important and how we are measuring it.
We know that this will take a collective effort to get right and is not something you can deliver overnight or from an entirely top-down approach. We also know that we’re not completely there yet, but this is what OKRs are great for: getting across what’s important allows people and teams to align autonomously with our goals as a company.
Elevating people and engagement goals to this level has not only helped ensure that we take people with us along the way but also has empowered them to act where they see an opportunity to make things better.
The opportunity in scale
We may be a fairly small business, but we punch well above our weight. Our success has required us to quickly scale and professionalise to keep up with our ambitions and our size has been an advantage in doing so. Whilst this growth phase can be a tumultuous time for any company, as a corollary, it’s also when things are the most malleable and, arguably, exciting! Importantly it means that, for anyone with the motivation, there is the chance to make changes that have a deep and lasting impact.
We have worked hard to attract great people from a range of backgrounds to work with us who are energised and inspired by what loveholidays can offer. They all share a common trait of wanting to make a difference and it’s great to see how they are taking the opportunity in their stride — even though it might sometimes mean stepping outside their day job. The impact they have had is making loveholidays a great place to work for everyone.
Celebrating inclusivity
At loveholidays, we pride ourselves on creating a working environment where employees feel happy and secure…and it shows. Whenever we run our employee engagement surveys, we ask how people would respond to the statement, “I can be myself at work”, and this always receives one of the most positive scores. We believe that this inclusive environment is a consequence of the values of the people that work here.
Building on this, a group of volunteers from the LGBTQ+ community organised our Pride celebrations, which included t-shirts and stickers for everyone to raise awareness and a party to celebrate our diversity. Michael Camp, our Facilities Coordinator, was the driving force behind this and described it as “Pride with a purpose” with “a community of inspirational people encouraging others to be their authentic selves and help both business and society move forward and make progress.”
Hacking for new ideas
To help enable autonomy, we organise ourselves cross-functionally around key business problems. Feedback has highlighted that as a consequence some people from different teams don’t get the chance to work together that often. To address this, help foster innovation and print even more stickers and t-shirts, David Annez, Director of Engineering, helped set up Hackfest.
It’s organised every six months, runs for four days and has yielded some incredibly impressive results. David has described this as “an opportunity for people from different teams to come together and work on some really cool ideas with huge achievements in a short space of time”. Many of our Hackfest ideas have actually ended up in production, but others are just for fun. One of the most memorable was when a team trained our chatbot AI, Sandy, to call everyone’s phone to convince them to vote for them!
Developing women in technology
We are always keen to provide support and development opportunities for our female employees, particularly those working in Technology fields, where we are working to address an underrepresentation of women.
We were delighted to support an initiative driven by Himaya Iyer, Product Manager, to bring the women in Technology together, share experiences and begin to work on initiatives to help them build their careers at loveholidays and beyond. The group is just getting started and are already planning to run a workshop at Women of Silicon Roundabout.
Sharing knowledge
Evelina Wahlström, Software Engineer, started the ‘lunch and learn’ initiative at loveholidays, telling us that her hope with these sessions is “to bring people from across the business together and learn from both internal and external speakers on many interesting topics.”
It has been an amazing success so far, with the last session run by Alfred Biehler, Head of Innovation at Google, to talk about building an innovative culture at loveholidays. We’re also giving people within the company the chance to share things they are passionate about (and brilliant at!) with colleagues across the organisation.
Measuring matters
Accountability, specifically the ability to understand the impact of your actions, is an important aspect in maintaining autonomy. Finding ways to measure how things have improved over time has been something we wanted to put in place from the start. We have published a blog post which covers the importance of measuring the same things consistently, and it’s something we have put in practice for employee engagement.
Since November 2020, we’ve been asking our people three key questions and using the combined total of those answering “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” to give us an overall engagement score. We started to measure this on a monthly basis from March this year to get faster feedback and in September, we saw the score reach 84% — the highest level so far.
Having this measure, and making it a company level KPI, has ensured that engagement is not just seen as an “HR thing”. It has helped us show that engagement remains a focus for the whole company. The commitment to regularly seeking feedback also means that people know they have a platform to share their views, and, crucially, that they will be taken on board.
We are also now able to show the impact we have had and see the data to back up the improvements we are making to the company and its culture — something that isn’t always easy with so much activity happening over such a short period of time.. It has proven our approach, helping us to confirm that we’re going in the right direction. We’ve come a long way, but we know but there’s still a lot we want to do to make things even better.
Leaving a footprint
One of the questions we are most frequently asked at interviews is, “What’s the culture like at loveholidays?”. It’s a great question as it acknowledges the importance that the working environment plays in being able to do your best. The answer is important to the business, too, as finding and attracting people that will feel comfortable and motivated by our company culture is vital to future success.
The best description we have is “the opportunity to leave a footprint” — to make an impact you can look back on with pride. We often limit the impact of this approach to the commercial measures. However, by making engagement and our people a priority for loveholidays, we are privileged to have seen how people are helping us refine our culture, making it inclusive, collaborative and rewarding.
Hopefully when people look back at their time at loveholidays they will not only be proud of what they achieved for the business but also the impact they have had on the people who work here too.