About The Specsavers Partnership

Founded 30 years ago with the core value of treating people as you would like to be treated, this still applies throughout Specsavers today. Leaders use the values as a ‘sense check’ when making decisions or plans, ensuring they are doing the right things for the right reasons. The board are very visible in the offices, including the founders Mary and Doug Perkins, who will often walk around and chat with staff. The open door policy means staff can speak to them whether in their office, making a coffee or queuing for lunch in the canteen. They often make surprise gestures to say thank you, for example on a particularly hot summer’s day one leader bought ice-creams for all 450 employees in their office to say thank you for their hard work. Every member of staff receives a birthday card signed by the Perkins and when a baby is born to a member of staff or their partner they receive a gift from Dame Mary, usually either a ‘nappy cake’ or ‘My first coin’s baby journal’ from the Royal Mint. Leaders host all employee communications meetings and also regularly bring their teams together to update on business-wide activities, share news and celebrate successes. Specsavers ethos of work hard and play hard stems into the year of end message from Mary and Doug, delivered in a humorous way by video or face-to-face, celebrating the year’s highlights and saying thank you to everyone. Another is the Profit Share announcement, when leaders deliver a hilarious sketch to staff making fun of themselves to announce the annual Profit share allocation.

Specsavers are passionate about giving back to and working with many local, national and international causes. The company are involved in a vast number of activities to raise money for charities, for example their continued work with Vision Aid Overseas to safeguard the nine eye clinics Specsavers established with them in Zambia. The company also help to deliver a range of hand-crafted quilts made in Guernsey to an orphanage in Johannesburg, South Africa. Also in its 20th year, the annual Spectacle Wearer of the Year competition has raised £80,000 for UK anti-bullying children’s charity Kidscape. New starters can donate a 'coin' to one of the charities that Specsavers support at the end of their induction, giving them an early understanding and participation in the organisation’s charity work. Through the 'Giving back to our local communities' policy, staff are also encouraged to spend one working day per year helping out in the community. Specsavers also have staff nominated charities in each office and encourage staff to raise money for them. Last year the company raised almost £190,000 for these fantastic charities.

Specsavers seeks to reward employees in a variety of formal and informal ways, from peer to peer shout outs and customer first awards to long service recognition and the annual Specsavers Ball. The company’s quarterly bonus is also based solely on an individual’s achievement of their objectives and is in no way related to company performance. All employees who have passed their probation are eligible to receive this. The scheme creates employee engagement, motivation and the need for Managers to manage their people effectively and appropriately. The scheme also means that all Managers have to meet each quarter to calibrate their bonus recommendations. This creates the need for a discussion about overall performance, like a mini people review on a regular basis, which thereby enables consistency and employee recognition amongst leadership teams.