How To Enter | PR Week's Best Places To Work

1: Culture, wellbeing and mental health support

How do you ensure your staff don't work excessive hours?
How do you compensate or reward staff who work excessive hours?
Detail any specific policies or schemes you have to support the mental health of employees
How you measure the success of these schemes?
How would you support a member of staff whose mental health appears to be suffering?
How you ensure line managers are able to support the mental health of their team?

Describe your organisation's approach to flexible working
Describe your organisation's parental leave policy or policies, including maternity and paternity pay
Do you offer benefits for parents and/or those caring for elderly relatives, and if so, what form do these take? Eg: childcare vouchers, home working, nursery/crèche arrangements
Do you have a 'returnship' programme for parents returning from parental leave? If so, please detail
How do you balance the needs of working parents with those of non-parents?
Please provide data, if applicable, to support the success of your flexible working and/or parental leave policies, eg: proportion of staff who return after parental leave

How do you decide what kind of training you provide to individual members of staff? Eg: during line manager appraisals, using third party training providers
Describe your approach to staff training
How do you measure the success of the training programmes?
How much money and/or time do you allocate to staff training and development?
How are staff promotions managed?
How do you identify and fill skills gaps?

Describe your approach to staff pay
Please describe your approach to staff bonuses. Eg: how the bonus is calculated, what percentage of profit is spent on bonuses
Are staff able to acquire equity in the business? If so, please detail your approach
What is your pay bracket for entry-level staff? Eg: £23k to £26k
How do you assess if staff are being fairly remunerated for their work? Eg: benchmarking against industry averages
Please describe your approach to holidays/annual leave
Please describe your approach to staff sabbaticals, if applicable, and detail how many employees have taken sabbaticals in the past three years
Describe your staff pension offer
Please list other main staff benefits that you offer. Eg: health insurance, gym membership, cycle to work schemes

Do you record and measure sickness absence for your agency/team, and if so how?
What is the average number of days that each member of staff takes as sickness each year?
What steps are you taking to reduce staff absences?
What percentage of job offers that you made over the last 12 months were accepted? (Please express as a percentage)
What percentage of your staff/team left in the past 12 months?
What is the average length of service at your agency/in your team?
How do you help newcomers settle into the business/your team?
Do you allow staff to refuse to work on accounts/campaigns if there is a clash of personal beliefs? Describe your approach
Describe your organisation's approach to corporate social responsibility

How do you encourage diversity in your recruitment, in terms of gender, ethnicity, educational background, disability and LGBTQ+?
What impact have your policies had on the makeup of the workforce? Eg: proportion of non-white and female staff and board members

Describe your organisation's approach to internships, if applicable
What impact has the internship scheme had on your organisation and on interns, if applicable? Eg: how many interns go on to become full-time staff members
Describe your organisation's approach to apprenticeships, if applicable
What impact has the apprenticeship scheme had on your organisation and on interns (if applicable)? Eg: how many interns go on to become full-time staff members