THCH has a number of initiatives in place aiming to deliver health, wellbeing, educational attainment and community cohesion. Some of these include: Employment and Training - through their partnership work with local providers and support to groups such as The Rooted Forum and Employment First, a number of training and capacity building programmes have been delivered to residents throughout 2013/14. Those who attended the sessions received detailed help and assistance. Debt and Welfare Advice - THCH continued to work with agencies, such as St Peter's Community & Advice Centre in Bethnal Green, providing debt, welfare and financial advice. Health & Wellbeing - a number of groups using the company's centres provide regular weekly health and welling activities, such as Zumba, martial arts and football – through to equally as enjoyable, but less energetic activities such as bingo and coffee mornings where residents can meet and gain help, support and friendship from each other. THCH have also maintained a number of health and wellbeing outreach sessions providing advise ranging from the cancer awareness workshops through to hosting events by the Tower Hamlets Food Growing Network, a local network of community food growers in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets providing advice on not just growing your own, but eating a balance and healthy diet. THCH were also delighted to receive £50,000 Sport England funding for an Outdoor Gym at the Cameron Best Park in Bethnal Green, which was opened by Olympic Gold Medallist, James DeGale in November 2013.

Supporting school breakfasts with donations, sponsoring local sports activities, apprenticeship schemes and Toureen ensure local people in all regions their sites are based in, have the chance to work on Toureen Projects. They also supported a community outreach activity for a local school they were working on. They built a 'skip garden' for the students so they were able to grow, nurture and harvest organic produce on the school grounds. They sank the skip into the ground and built a walkway around it using recycled materials.

TMW's founding partner and Group CEO, Richard Marshall, has an unusually honest and open style which makes people feel empowered and truly part of the business. There's a TV series called Back to the Shop Floor but in truth, Richard spends as much time on the shop floor as he does in Executive Board meetings! If, for example, a pitch opportunity comes in and it's all hands to the deck, Richard throws himself at it without any questions. This inspires respect from those around him and a desire to go the extra mile for him. He genuinely cares about people in the business and has a knack of knowing most of the detail of what's going on. He's also very intuitive, quickly spotting when things aren't quite right, either at the level of an individual or more broadly, in business matters. He's been described in an article in the trade press as 'one of the nicest people in the business' and most of TMW would agree with this.

All of the Directors, in both offices, sit in the open plan space with the wider team at The Test People. This allows for collaboration and communication and a closer relationship with employees. The Senior Management Team are prominent sources of expertise in the TTP Community and also the wider testing community. The SMT commitment to the values has also recently been illustrated by the agreement to include the company values in the new Talent Management framework, which will soon be launched. This will ensure that the values are prominent and reinforced by all of the company's managers to their teams during performance chats. The main way in which the SMT promote their values is to lead by example. At Director level, there is a strong commitment to creativity and ensuring TTP are at the forefront of new initiatives within Testing. Senior Management also empower their teams to work autonomously and find new solutions to complex technical and testing challenges.

In September 2014, The Marketing Practice took the whole company to the Bluestone National Park, Pembrokeshire, Wales for a superb 5* 2 day team build event; themed "The Purple Dragon Games". They had 4 house teams and created a magical, memorable 'Harry Potter' adventure, starting with a sorting hat event to decide their houses. The spirit of the theme ran ahead of the games, during the games and created stories and memories that will live long in staff's memories. Zip wire, tug-of-war, archery, a blind fold assault course, shelter building, ball hurling and forest battles are just a few of the activities during the days. Add to that a BBQ in a ravine and a fancy dress gala dinner where their favourite magical tunes played into the small hours, it is fair to say they had a fabulous time, learnt new things about each other and discovered new skills within themselves.

Through schemes such as ‘Jenrick's Helping Hand' and the ‘Jenrick Charity Photo Calendar', the company donates in excess of £2,000 per year to charitable causes nominated by staff and the local community. The ‘Helping Hand' charity initiative is run each year and enables any member of staff to nominate a charitable cause that they would like Jenrick to donate £1,000 towards. Once all the nominations are received, an online voting system enables every individual member of the company to decide which cause they believe merits the award. For every additional pound given in personal staff donations Jenrick also doubles the amounts. Every year, The Jenrick Group create a ‘charity photo calendar competition' allowing candidates, clients and their own staff to enter in photos based on a theme. The competition is now in its sixth year and has already raised thousands of pounds to a large number of charitable causes. The final 12 winning photographs are featured in Jenrick's calendar and each winner receives £100 to donate to a charity of their choice. These schemes are so unique to Jenrick, and for a company of their size, it's quite remarkable how much money they have raised over the last few years, often raising awareness for lesser known charities. It would be very easy to 'follow the norm' and nominate a designated charity each year, however, because Jenrick's values are built around ‘People', having two schemes that allow individuals to nominate charities very close to their hearts adds far more meaning.

Andrew Barker joined SFS over 22 years ago as their Technical Manager and has subsequently worked his way up to become Managing Director in 2011. Due to his experience of working in SFS, Andrew has extensive knowledge of the whole business and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by staff in each area. With this in mind, he maintains open engagement with his staff at all levels and has launched many innovative staff engagement initiatives such as License to Grill where staff can ‘grill' him in team meetings and License to Chuck. Andrew is committed to attend every Financial Planning Manager Roadshow nationwide and is a guest at department team meetings once a year. He also holds quarterly business update briefings to all HO staff and issues a monthly update email with his personal thoughts. Upon his appointment to MD, he abolished the MD's private office and remains seated with his colleagues. Andrew asked for this room to be used for study purposes to help staff who want to gain further qualifications to enhance their career. Andrew is well liked by many staff due to his ability to engage with people on all levels. Whilst he is already well respected for his knowledge of the business, he is well known for encouraging a ‘fun element' to working for SFS by organising many staff events and competitions and with his references to popular culture, which he often demonstrates in his presentations to staff. At previous conferences, Andrew has taken part in a comedy video and the outtakes often sees him at the end of a joke, and for this, amongst many other things he does, he is respected by staff for not taking himself too seriously and they see him as very approachable.

Salford Royal operate an annual Staff Awards scheme which last year saw more than 200 individuals or teams nominated for being compassionate, supportive and dedicated to providing excellent patient care. More than 600 staff attended their most recent event, which saw awards for Collaboration, Administrative worker, Doctor, and Team of the Year. Staff nominated people within the award categories and they then vote for their preferred winner when the shortlist is announced. The Patient's Star Award gives patients and relatives the opportunity to nominate a team or individual who had gone above and beyond the call of duty to provide exceptional care, support or treatment. The shortlist is then put to the public vote in the local paper.

To assist in giving structure to their team members development, Robin Partington & Partners implemented a career guideline which has six levels within their Company and each level has nine grades, split equally between ‘Arrivals', ‘Duty Free' and ‘Departures' . Each level has a Job Description that explains what is expected from that role. To explain the method to their madness…Arrivals is for those who have just moved into a new level and are getting used to the respective role and responsibilities, but are not yet proficient or adept and are busy finding their feet. Duty Free is for those who are comfortable in that role and are busy banking experience and expertise with Departures being for those who are ready to move up to the next level and are busy acquiring the necessary launching skills for that move. Robin Partington & Partners believe that the levels and job descriptions they have in place provide a clear and transparent structure for the practice, encouraging a strong sense of ownership of projects and the Company as a whole. They take professional development very seriously and hold performance appraisals twice annually to provide an opportunity for all their staff to review their performance from the previous year, and consider opportunities to develop and grow in the year to come, including any help, support or training that the Company can provide. Robin Partington & Partners have designed the process to help their team to think about their role using a combination of self assessment and peer feedback to encourage real, meaningful and helpful conversations….it is always good to find the time to talk. They have found that regular reality checks work for all concerned, the individual and the Company, helping to ensure that skills are recognised and individuals are valued at an appropriate level within the Company, using the job descriptions as a guide. They do their best to avoid any potential mismatch between expectation and reward. Their performance appraisals are intended to be simple, engaging and painless, but do require time and careful thought to get the most out of it. A combination of self-assessment and peer feedback encourages real, meaningful and helpful conversations, so that you know where you stand, what is expected and what to do next in order to progress.

Their managing director does his utmost to engage with staff at all levels in a friendly manner. He's not afraid of being the butt of a joke & their regularly published internal newsletter (PowerNews) often leads with a terrible picture of Darren.