Questions With Kirsty

In Conversation with Kirsty Conroy

Head of People, The Parently Group

We talk a lot about The Parently Way, tell us more about how we live and breathe our values as a workforce.

With a quarterly theme, related to a cultural value running through the year, we work on adding value and enriching life through engagement for all our people at The Parently Group. This could include online sessions with external providers, various freebies, physical sessions (pre-covid) and lots of info about topics. It’s evident each day how teams are working together, progressing and are engaged to succeed. This comes down to all our people being encouraged to speak up with ideas, be heard and always feel there’s a fairness to the way we do things. I’m always blown away by the kindness gestures going on all over the place all through the year! From special event recognition and collections to the kindness of giving time to listen. A true reflection of kindness being an authentic value in so many of our people’s lives and so to support and focus on kindness with events is an easy one as it’s happening already!

It is important that as an organisation we are also able to offer our kindness out in to the community. Over the last few years this has been in the form of charity volunteering days, as well as donating to our chosen charities through various campaigns. This is however an area we are looking to do more of in to 2022 and beyond.

The value of growth has certainly been at the forefront of day to day, week to week these last 18 months, we have all had to learn, change, adapt across the business to ensure we stay agile and fit for these uncertain times. It has meant many of our people learning new systems, procedures within the company and many have also undertaken qualifications or certificates in their chosen area of work to ensure they continue to progress and grow as individuals too.

It’s been a tough time for the whole workforce, how has your approach to kindness and nurturing the culture of our business adapted to the challenges of Covid?

As a result of the pandemic and restrictions on going to work for over half our workforce, it meant we instantly lost those daily catch ups’ over making a coffee, chance updates just because you were in the office or being there for someone we could see who needed it. All of this, whilst also understanding that our warehouse team were still coming in to work every day and we needed to ensure their safety and wellbeing too.

It was certainly a challenge, but we stuck to our principles to ensure everyone felt connected, still felt engaged with the wider business and most importantly they were keeping well mentally and physically. We worked closely with all the managers to ensure they focused on every single member of their team through intentional and regular contact with them all, particularly those on furlough.

A big adaptation was moving online for so much communication and sharing generally, both business and personal through a banter channel which was for the whole organisation, on and off site, but it worked! The daily updates and videos to keep everyone informed and supported from the senior management team, on top of wider management focus on individual connections, and even a few online quizzes, were imperative. It underpinned the true value we live and breathe of kindness and engagement. We ensured it was clear to see that support was there as well as an understanding of various situations and emotions – and the best thing is, these were not planned, ‘cultural building’ activities – it just happened and re-confirmed how authentic these values really are in so many of us.