Fleet Alliance: A great place to work x 10

Ten. Ten times and 10 awards. That’s our terrific record for nominations as A Great Place To Work. Which is just fantastic news, a recognition made more welcome by COVID disrupting our normal working lives with lockdowns, the working from home, and the not seeing colleagues.

Never mind, Fleet Alliance continues to be a great place to work. We’ve just been listed once more in the UK’s Best Places to Work in the largest category by entrants for medium sized businesses (51-250 employees).

So how does this work? Central to our ranking in The UK’s Best Places to Work is a Trust Audit and a Culture Audit run by the Great Place to Work Institute. A survey of all staff explores the employee experience at work and also aims to understand the standards and company ethos that underpins the working practice at Fleet Alliance. It’s fully independent.

Most staff were based at home during 2021 making it especially challenging to sustain staff wellbeing against a challenging business climate where demand for vehicle leasing was high but the semiconductor shortage put a strain on vehicle availability.

And many of our staff benefits have simply not been available thanks to absence from the office. But with effective communications, trusting our staff to maintain high standards under difficult working conditions – bedrooms and kitchens, for example – and constant attention to staff wellbeing have all helped create a better employee experience, even under these trying conditions.

But central to why I think Fleet Alliance is such a good place to work is because it’s all underpinned by the ‘Fleet Alliance Loves’ programme. This is the bedrock, the very core of the Fleet Alliance working environment. And it’s based on these four pillars:

• Fairness,
• Trust,
• Engagement, and
• Respect

It not only provides a framework for employee behaviour – happy, fun, inclusive – it encourages staff to look beyond their working environment and consider their place within a wider social context, particularly those who are more disadvantaged. Fundraising and charity involvement is a special part of the team ethos and I was particularly pleased to see staff raise over £5,000 for our annual Festive Support Fund over Christmas, with donations going to the Glasgow NE Foodbank, Glasgow NW Foodbank, FareShare Sussex and Sussex Nightstop.

The Christmas charity support is just part of a phenomenal £667,000 the Fleet Alliance team has raised as part of the Fleet Alliance Loves programme, which is a great credit to all the company’s employees.

With the worst of the pandemic out of the way – please let it be so – I hope we can return to the office environment we all enjoyed and valued so much before COVID-19 restrictions became such a constricting part of our everyday lives.

We’ll certainly be making extra efforts to welcome our staff back, including the addition of some hybrid working, to continue being a brilliant place to work.