The NSPCC is renowned for its work protecting and supporting children. What is less well known is that the organisation’s reward and benefits policies have been enhanced to promote this ethos.
Rosie Maltas, head of reward and benefits at the NSPCC, explains that the organisation has invested in benefits that ensure employees and volunteers can give their children the best start, as people need more from their employers than ever.
How long have you been in your current role and what attracted you to the organisation?
I joined the NSPCC HR team in 2019 and have held roles including head of people operations and people process improvement lead, becoming head of reward and benefits in February this year. As one of the UK’s leading children’s charities, I had always admired the work that the NSPCC does to prevent abuse and then also support children, young people and their families. When I saw an opportunity to work even just as a really small part of that I jumped at the chance.
How big is your HR team and how many employees are there in the organisation?
The NSPCC’s people directorate has 68 people in total. This covers everything from operations, reward, organisational workforce development, learning and development, workforce engagement, resourcing, business partnering, equality, diversity and inclusion, change management, and legal and property. Those 68 people cover a lot of areas. Within that, the reward and benefits team is me and one other person.
The charity has around 1,700 employees and almost 6,000 volunteers. Our employees work on Childline and our adult helpline, we have social workers and people that work in the community linking us with other services to try and look at things as a whole.
In terms of volunteers our biggest cohort are our Childline counsellors. We also have fundraisers and volunteers who go into schools to talk about our ‘Speak out stay safe’ safeguarding initiative, as well as our young witness service in Northern Ireland where volunteers accompany children if they need to go to court cases.
What benefits are currently offered to your employees?
There are six different areas: pay and financial benefits; wellbeing; family friendly; learning and development; our NSPCC; and ways of working.
The pay and financial side includes our commitment to paying our employees salaries that are at least comparable with the top charities in the UK. We also have pensions, life assurance, season ticket loans, the cycle to work scheme and our discounts portal. The portal offers thousands of discounts on everyday products and services for people to dip into.
Wellness is huge for us. We’ve got a wellness hub on our intranet, which is a one stop shop that signposts people to lots of different tools, resources, information and policies. We hold quarterly wellness weeks, which align to our four pillars of wellness: emotional, physical, social and financial. We have an employee assistance programme (EAP), which is open to our volunteers as well as employees.
We also do as much as we can around leave to support wellness. So in addition to annual leave we offer lots of other types of leave to ensure that people are taking that time away from work to focus on themselves.
Given the family focused work of the NSPCC, we strongly emphasise the importance of providing children with the best start in life and this is reflected in our policies.
We do the best that we can for our employees to support their own children and families as it’s such a big part of people’s lives. But it’s also really, really important for children starting life to have that family time. So we’ve got enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption and fostering leave and then we’ve also got carers leave, IVF leave and neonatal. We support our people with leave for pregnancy loss and parental bereavement.
It’s about looking at our people as a whole and what means the most to them, which isn’t always in your pay packet. We offer flexible and hybrid working to support people through the various different periods of life.
The NSPCC puts a lot of focus on that area of family related benefits because of who we are as an organisation. We try and lead the way to show other employers what a difference it can make if you really invest in that side of things.
Our culture is key to what we do, so we have ‘Our NSPCC’ benefits which help to embed equality, diversity and inclusion into everything we do. Our employee ‘lived experience networks’ are a crucial part of this with groups that include the black workers support group, action 4 deaf and disabled as people together, and the menopause network, to name a few.
On the learning and development side, we’ve got a huge number of online courses available through our online academy. This benefit is for volunteers and employees to dip into and do as much online training as they want. We have lots of other L&D financial support options and study leave for external training.
How do you ensure employees know about the benefits available?
Our 36-page benefits booklet details everything we offer. It’s something that we’ve developed over time and are always adding to. It goes out on all of our job adverts as a way to promote our total rewards package to entice new people.
We host all the information on our reward and benefits hub on our intranet and we incorporate the information into our induction materials.
When we do our wellness weeks each quarter we link people into our benefits again. We might get one of our external providers on the EAP to come and give a virtual session on mental health. Then the video would be uploaded to our volunteer intranet so that they can watch it at a time that works for them.
What are your current HR/benefits challenges?
We’re a charity, so it’s really important that we spend our money wisely. Like a lot of organisations our people need more from us, at the same time we’re also facing increasing pressure externally. This affects our fundraising and the everyday costs of running the charity. We’re trying to balance that with what we can offer people.
We continue to prioritise pay and benchmark it with the market, but also, it’s about ensuring people are aware of the total reward package they can tap into. That’s more important than ever.
Another challenge is that we have to balance doing a lot of stuff in the family friendly suite of policies with being mindful and sensitive to people who maybe don’t have those caring responsibilities. People that might be unable to have children or have suffered a loss in that area. We need to balance the needs of what we know is a large proportion of our people, while being sensitive and not overshadowing others.
How are you supporting employees with the cost-of-living crisis?
Through our pay promise. In the last three years, we’ve delivered four consolidated pay awards, two of those were in 2022 just at the point, around November 2022, when the cost of living crisis really felt like it was taking hold.
We look at our pay bands each year and where possible uplift them, with particular focus on the bottom bands so that our lower earners, whether that be in real terms or within their pay range, are the focus equally.
What’s the best employee benefit you’ve ever had?
For me, it is about that total package because different benefits mean something to you at different times. For that every day saving, I think our discount portal is brilliant. I can save on my shop every single week. I’ve not had that anywhere else I’ve worked.
I think the fact that we’ve got that 24/7 EAP service where you can pick up the phone and get matched with a counsellor within the day is amazing, particularly given the long wait times for NHS mental health services and counselling. With the EAP you get six sessions of counselling that you can start pretty much straight away.
If you had an unlimited budget, what employee benefit would you like to introduce for employees?
A personal training path for every employee and every volunteer. It could be for formal training, coaching, mentoring and it would be refreshed each year. It’s the kind of thing that enables people to feel like they can invest in themselves.
I’d also invest more in the organisational development team to keep delivering more on leadership and management development to continue to build psychological safety.
Something else that would be such a benefit for so many would be having a nursery or creche attached to our bases.
