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Employee relations

We want Kaplan to be a great place to work, where everyone can succeed.

As a purpose driven organisation, we ensure that everyone at Kaplan understands why we do what we do and the contribution that they make towards achievement of our ambition and goals. How everything we do connects back to our purpose and how we work together to create success.

A collection of cut-out paper hands

How everything connects

  1. Purpose – the reason we do what we do.
  2. Promise – the commitment we make to our learners, candidates, clients, customers and colleagues.
  3. Personality – how we sound when we communicate, our tone of voice and brand persona.
  4. Values – the backbone of our brand, the driving force behind us all living our purpose and promise every day.
  5. Vision – the business we want to become.
  6. Key performance indicators – for creating and measuring success.
  7. Goals – moving us towards our vision.
  8. Team and individual goalss – your contribution, the difference you make, how you create success.

To embed this in our culture we have an induction programme for new joiners called 'setting you up for success' which ensures everyone is clear on our purpose and their role in delivering it.

Employment policies

We are fully committed to conducting our business in a way which embraces diversity and promotes equality and inclusion - and as an employer we value this within our workforce.

We believe in remunerating employees fairly for the work that they do, and providing fair and equal access to progression. We ensure all our employees are paid a rate that is no less than those published by the Living Wage Foundation. We publish our gender pay gap report annually and this drives activity within the company.

All our roles have a defined level and transparent salary bands. This provides clarity and fairness for everyone. All employees also have access to our comprehensive benefits package.

We have a comprehensive suite of employee policies including:

  • Paternity/partner leave
  • Adoption leave
  • Parental leave
  • Menopause
  • Recruitment and selection
  • Employee equality diversity and inclusion

Our Employment Policies, plus additional guidance for managers, are shared on our employee intranet.

A woman and two men having a discussion around a table

Employee voice

We create multiple opportunities for employees to share their experiences, views, ideas and suggestions.

  • Representative networks

    We operate champions/representatives networks across a number of key areas such as GDPR, safeguarding, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, and Business Continuity. These are a great opportunity for sharing what we are trying to achieve and get really great practical suggestions about how these can be achieved as well as help implementing them.

  • Employee Engagement Survey

    We invite employees to share how they feel about Kaplan as a place to work, where we are doing well or improving, and where we still have room to do better through our annual Employee Engagement Survey.

    Feedback from the survey informs the employee goals we set for the following year to ensure we are continually improving and changing as people's priorities change.

  • Opportunities to be part of the conversation

    We provide multiple ways for our employees to get involved in conversations about our business - examples include regular team meetings, chances to get involved in projects/new initiatives and a host of opportunities to share their views, thoughts and ideas and connect directly with our Senior Executives through our employee intranet.

    Our employee intranet also provides a social space where employees with shared interests or passions can connect in Community Hubs.

  • Raising a concern

    We have clear channels for employees to raise issues either informally or through more formal routes such as our Grievance or Whistleblowing procedures. Where issues are raised, appropriate steps are taken to address the concerns and ensure that employees who raise concerns are protected from detriment as a result.

Two way communication

We use multiple channels to keep employees informed about our business, our ambitions, our goals and how we are doing.

We do this via:

  • An interactive employee intranet with content owned and authored by colleagues across the business
  • Quarterly business updates from the Executive Leadership Team
  • Regular blogs from our CEO
  • Ongoing, open invitation to ‘Ask the Exec’ a question, on any subject
  • Monthly senior manager briefings, cascaded and discussed at at monthly team meetings
  • Monthly updates on our Key Performance Indicators (KPI) focused on learner/candidate satisfaction, client satisfaction, and financial performance
  • News of the Week - opportunities for employees to share their stories with colleagues across the UK.

Employee recognition

Recognising colleagues and teams who have gone ‘above and beyond’ is an important part of our culture. We want to make this a great place to work where everyone can succeed and have a range of schemes available to employees and managers to recognise and say thank you to colleagues for exemplifying our values and helping us to create shared success together.

“Diagram showing that employees can be recognised by Colleagues, Managers, and Kaplan.  

Recognition from Kaplan

The Kaplan Way Awards - UK and Global recognition for exemplifying the guiding principles that describe the type of company we are and want to be.

We award employees that embody the values and principles of Kaplan, which are:

  • Student Success
  • Great Place
  • Shared Values
  • Continuous Transformation

All employees are able to nominate colleagues for the awards. We typically receive more than 600 nominations each year.

Recognition from managers

A flexible recognition framework for managers to recognise and celebrate outstanding achievements of their team members. Typically team members are invited to nominate their colleagues,some schemes also invite nominations from outside of the immediate team. Awards are made monthly or quarterly.

Recognition from colleagues

Employees are able to ‘send a star’ as instant recognition to say thank you to colleagues, or whole teams, who have helped them personally, their team or the wider organisation. Recipients are featured on the main homepage of our employee intranet.

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