It’s wonderful to achieve the Great Place to Work label, it is even better to achieve the Best Place to Work label, and what makes it even more amazing is to be surprised with an extra award during the award ceremony. X-Care in Motion is proud to be part of the temporary staffing agency Planet Group that finished fifth place in their category as a Great Place to Work and walked home with the Holistic Wellbeing Award as well. We talked to HR Manager Eva Vercruyssen about what makes a Great Place to Work and why they earned the honorary badge.
Eva: Thank you! And yes we were. Obviously we are enormously happy to have achieved fifth place as a Great Place to Work – which makes us a Best Place to Work, but the Holistic Wellbeing Award really was the cherry on top considering how all other participants are hugely focused on this topic as well. Frankly, everyone in the room deserved to take home this recognition; and to see how it was ultimately Planet Group to do so makes us incredibly proud. Not in the least because we are an HR centered company.
We haven’t received very detailed feedback on this win, but the jury told us that they were immensely inspired by all of the team initiatives and events we organise for our employees. Apparently we were truly outstanding in that! For instance, last year we organised a variety of sports activities in which everyone at Planet Group could freely participate. It’s lovely to see how those initiatives were picked up, but wellbeing for us really goes much further than that.
Eva: For us, you experience wellbeing on the work floor when you truly get to be yourself. An authentic work culture where you’re not expected to be someone you’re not. It’s the small things, like being free in living out your personality, wearing what you want, expressing your personal style, etc. Which might all sound very normal, but which is something that gets repeatedly emphasised by the people in our team. That they love the feeling of being able to stay true to themselves at work.
We don’t think in boxes, and we don’t believe in big hierarchies. It even shows when you look at our office; both our headquarters and the office we have in MeetDistrict Brussels. We’re very set on a homey and cosy atmosphere. To create an environment in which you feel at home, even while you’re at the office. You can be yourself.
Eva: We were just talking about how there is an actual X-Care Community. Not only made up of the people who currently work for us or with us, but also of former employees who are still sympathetic to our organisation and continue to bring us into contact with new talent.
When it was announced how the football stadium in Gent was going to be named Planet Group Arena, you just felt how everyone was proud as a peacock. And having that many people who stand by Planet Group is more valuable than any marketing campaign, really.
Eva: It does. You know, you have to score at least 70% for your employee happiness survey to be awarded with the GPTW label, so that alone is wonderful as it is. The final result is calculated based on the combination of your survey score and the collection of all of your HR practices, vision, initiatives, etc. Out of those results, the ten best workplaces per category were selected. Each year, you can also register for some additional awards. So to both reel in the Best Place to Work label and the Holistic Wellbeing Award was a beautiful acknowledgement.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t invite the entire Planet Group team to the award show. Really a shame, since each and every colleague made a contribution to this win. So instead of bringing the people to the show, we brought the show to the people by letting our marketing lead set up a live broadcast of the evening. Which made for so many thankful and funny reactions, and which made the evening even more beautiful than it already was.
How is that for making everyone feel included!
