Partou has been named as a finalist in The Appreciation Awards 2024 for Most Transformational Culture Change Through Employee Experience Programme.
The announcement comes shortly after the day nursery provider - part of the leading childcare group in the Netherlands - was shortlisted in five categories in the National NMT Nursery Awards.
The Reward Gateway | Edenred Appreciation Awards are a celebration of the outstanding work that HR teams across the UK are doing to create a positive employee experience and a culture of appreciation within their organisations.
In 2023, Partou acquired and began the process of merging Just Childcare and All About Children.
This involved integrating around 2,500 team members across 106 sites and successfully completing an overhaul of leadership, processes, culture and business strategy under the Partou brand.
Samantha Rhodes, Partou Managing Director, said: “A new team was formed to lead the Human Resources function and our first change to embed was a name change from HR to People and Culture. A reorganised team also enabled a shift from reactive to proactive working practices and a move from process and policy to trust and empowerment.”
A People Experience team and a separate People Operations team allowed the function to focus on identifying a new set of values as part of Partou’s shared culture, whilst work began on the creation of a WE CARE plan to improve the team member experience through policy and benefit change.
Samantha continued: “To make meaningful change we needed to identify what our culture was going to be, make that live and breathe through our policies and ways of working, and communicate this effectively to all team members.
“We started with a Culture and Values assessment, asking our team members what their personal values are, the current values of their business and what desired values they wanted the Partou UK brand to hold.
“This exercise identified three values that were consistent between personal, current and desired – Care, Compassion and Continuous Learning.”
She added: “I am incredibly proud of the work that has been done and is ongoing.
“It’s particularly pleasing that these efforts have been recognised so swiftly with Partou being shortlisted for an Appreciation Award.
“Full credit goes to team members across all our settings around the country for what they have achieved in such a short space of time.”
Nick Burns, CEO at Reward Gateway | Edenred, a leading employee experience platform, said: “Congratulations to Partou on making it as a finalist in our 2024 Appreciation Awards.
“Our awards are a great opportunity to celebrate the amazing achievements we are seeing across our customer base which demonstrate how harnessing the power of appreciation and creating a positive employee experience can drive business success.”
The Appreciation Awards 2024 will be presented at an evening ceremony in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London on Wednesday 13 November.