Equity, Purpose, Pride, Integrity and Courage are the five values that guide us in our shared mission as employees at eQS. For any company, values are meant to be the soul of the organisation, and help cultivate a positive working culture. We see our eQS values as a core element of our inclusive culture, and in developing them we knew we wanted them to be embedded into everyday life at eQS. This meant finding engaging ways to bring them to life, make them relevant to people’s roles and celebrate the impact our values have on our people and our customers. One of the highlights in our internal communications calendar for our people is our eQS Group Values Awards ceremony.
To emphasise the importance of our group values, every year we hold an eQS Group Values Awards ceremony. This is the second year it’s taken place, and we are excited about how this might grow in the coming years (find out what happened at our first Group Values Awards here).
It’s important our people are aware of the group values all year round, not just for the few weeks of the year that we talk about the ceremony. Therefore, we have nominations for our awards open all year round. This means our people can nominate a colleague as soon as they witness them living one of our group values rather than having to remember examples that have taken place over the last 12 months. Throughout the year, we also post ‘staff spotlights’ in our all-staff chat channel, showcasing prior year winners’ stories, as well as branded values graphics and regular reminders to make a nomination.
With our staff being located as far north as Newcastle and as far south as Plymouth we held the eQS Group Values Awards ceremony online to ensure everyone felt included. Everyone got into the spirit of the event with the team congratulating the winners in the chat and the screen filling with the applause emoji when the winners were announced.
Like any good awards ceremony there was plenty of hype in the lead up to the event. The week before the event, the nominations for each category were announced.
We also wanted to think about how we could build on the success of the previous year’s awards. This year, every nominated member of staff received a letter from our senior leadership team which also included all of their nominations, as well as a group values branded notepad as a keepsake.
All winners received a trophy. We loved the trophy idea so much, we decided to also give all of last year’s winners a trophy too. We fully expect these trophies to become as iconic as an Oscar or a Bafta in years to come.
This year there were 48 nominations which was an increase on the previous year. This resulted in over a third of the total staff receiving a nomination. Below is a snapshot of some of these 48 nominations.
We’ve removed names to protect our team’s privacy.
This year’s eQS Group Values Awards highlighted the impact of living our values in everyday work. Every nomination, every recognition, and every celebration reminds us that our values are more than words – they guide how we work, collaborate, and support each other across the company. Going forward, we know that recognising and celebrating those who live our values will remain central to our culture and the driving force behind our impact.
This blog was written by Richard Keeling, eQS Disability Support Marketing Manager.
Richard is responsible for leading the development of marketing and communications content, internally and externally across our group of companies, including the management of marketing and communications campaigns, webinars and events.
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