With Catherine Orezzi, HR Director of Rendall & Rittner
Property management is a people-centred industry focused on delivering the best possible service to residents and clients. Having a happy and engaged workforce is integral to delivering that level of service. That’s why Rendall & Rittner has an employee wellbeing strategy that underpins its operations, ensuring that wellbeing is a priority and team members enjoy a good life/work balance.
Cat Orezzi is Rendall & Rittner’s HR Director. Having joined the company in 2017, Cat recently became a group board director giving the company’s people initiatives even greater impetus. Here she explains how Rendall & Rittner supports the wellbeing of its employees.
What is Rendall & Rittner’s approach to staff wellbeing?
Our employees are integral to everything we want to achieve as a business, so it is crucial that they feel valued and empowered. We are very proud of our Investors in People Platinum accreditation, which demonstrates our commitment to great workplace practices and people management. Our wellbeing strategy is built around four pillars – mental, physical, social and financial. We base our activities around them and continuously develop initiatives further to feedback from our employees.
What initiatives has the company put in place to look after staff wellbeing?
We use an employee engagement and wellbeing programme called LifeWorks, which includes support for a wide range of work, health, financial and life issues. The many benefits it offers include confidential counselling sessions, wellbeing assessments and toolkits, online exercise classes, and gym and retail discounts. It is available for free to all employees and their families. We use a wide range of channels to communicate with colleagues on wellbeing matters including monthly broadcasts, intranet, team meetings, our staff newsfeed and colleague recognition, so that they feel connected and engaged.
How do you support employees’ mental health?
This is a key area we pay attention to. Among our employees is a team of trained mental health first aiders who can identify, understand and help colleagues who may be experiencing mental health issues. We run various activities that promote understanding of these matters for example during Mental Health Awareness Week and Stress Awareness Month we run training, events and signpost to online resources.
We run training, via both eLearning and instructor led sessions, to promote good mental health and build resilience. It is helping us to implement our unreasonable behaviour policy aligning with ARMA’s recommendations.
Does Rendall & Rittner support flexible working?
There has been a big shift towards flexible and agile working patterns, particularly since the pandemic. We have responded and our flexible approach remains popular with 60% of our office-based employees wishing to continue to work from home. We’ve developed an agile working strategy where employees can follow flexible hours, based on what suits their own work-life balance.
Our people can also attend our offices for meetings and face to face interaction with colleagues and we are upgrading our offices to enable enhanced collaborative working, alongside hot desking.
What else do you offer employees to make them feel valued?
We know that energised and happy staff are more productive, so we encourage them to recharge through additional paid time off. In addition to the usual holidays, they get time off for Employee Appreciation Day and individuals are permitted to observe their own religious and cultural holidays.
We also organise a range of social events to bring people together for more informal and fun occasions from quizzes to team outings. We are keen for our people to give back to causes they care about so we organise various charity fundraising events and other community initiatives such as litter picking. We also want employees to have an outlet to share their passions and interests so we’ve got numerous channels on the Yammer platform where people can discuss topics and find like-minded individuals.
How do you know these initiatives are making a difference?
We’ve established good channels of communication and we frequently ask our employees what they think and how we could do better. We issue a quarterly survey on staff satisfaction and wellbeing – from this we know that 89% of our employees would recommend Rendall & Rittner as a place to work and 93% agree we offer an inclusive working environment. We also collect regular feedback from face-to-face meetings, collaborative working and informal check-ins. But most importantly we don’t just listen, we act. We are continually refining and improving the way we look after our people, so they have a fulfilling and rewarding career with us.
