One of the most impactful ways that we continue to make everyone feel included and supported is through our culture of feedback. Everyone is encouraged to share any concerns, challenges or experiences of discrimination with their manager; everyone is also reminded regularly that our dedicated People Partners, Mental Health First Aiders and senior leadership are all happy to meet with anyone in the company to listen and find a tailored solution. Any reported experience of discrimination is taken seriously and reported to a People Partner; our SLT will also be notified and together we work through the problem at hand, taking the relevant action and updating processes to avoid the same thing happening again.
We make sure to support and celebrate diversity throughout the year with celebrations, panel events and lunch and learns. At the start of each year we ask our team what culture and engagement events they'd like to see us celebrate, such as Eid. During the run up to Eid we support employees during Ramadan and ask them which adjustments we can make to support them, and then we mark the event by writing a newsletter spotlighting traditions to give the wider team understanding and insight into this celebration. For International Women's Day, we hosted an internal panel with women from across the business, and for Autism Awareness Week a member of our team gave a lunch-n-learn to educate and share their experience of autism in the workplace.
Any change within the business is also approached in an agile way in which the team is part of the discovery and forming stage. We recently launched new company values and we held a focused group to collaborate with the wider business, to make sure the messaging felt right to the team and that everyone understands them before we action them.
By creating a workplace where our employees feel happy, well and able to be themselves, our goal is that they'll want to stay with us. In 2021, our staff turnover rate for full-time staff was 28.6%, and for part-time staff it was 16.7%. In 2021 we made 21 internal promotions, reflecting the success of our culture of learning where everybody is supported to achieve their potential.
We have a £300 budget set aside every month to be spent on EDI workshops, panel talks and anything else our team asks to see or learn about. This is managed by our dedicated EDI committee. Recently we put a spotlight on the experience of menopause at work, with a talk and Q&A from Rebeka Brown at Mpowder. Our whole company has completed unconscious bias training from a visiting consultant. To mark International Women's Day, we organised an internal panel of female employees from senior, mid-level and junior roles to talk about their experience of being a woman in the workplace. Coming up in June, we have a Gendered Intelligence training for everyone, which will help our team understand the key ideas and information people need to know about trans-related matters such as creating a trans-inclusive environment, using the term and legislation relating to trans identities. We also allow total flexibility of working hours for people who fast during Ramadan. We make sure that we're seeing ROI here by regularly gathering feedback from everyone in our 2-monthly eNPS survey. Our current eNPS score is a positive 63.
To keep a close eye on the diversity and inclusion within our team, we collect D&I data for every employee when they are onboarded. This is an anonymous survey that tells us how our team is feeling in terms of wellbeing, psychological safety, inclusion and more. This is stored and monitored through our HR system Hibob, so we always know where we're doing better and where we can improve. In this onboarding survey, we collect data for a range of categories, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, schooling, caregiving responsibility, disability, and level of education for employees and their parents. Here we also make sure to include the option "prefer not to say" for every question, as this data is equally important, and it's one way in which we prioritise our team's inclusion and psychological safety at every step. We also send an annual EDI survey which has a focus on inclusion, belonging and equality. The data we collect is also live and can be updated at any time so we can make sure we have the best reflection of our team at any one time.
As well as supporting everyone in our team to use their annual L&D budget of £350 to build long-term professional skills, we've also secured a further budget to build out our learning hub. This is an online platform filled with video courses, interactive tasks and written resources on skills such as project management, giving and receiving feedback and guides to how MyTutor works so everyone can develop themselves personally and professionally. It’s about putting colleagues back in the driving seat but giving them the level of support, guidance and resources they need to succeed in their learning and development. We secured this budget by proving the ROI with reduced time to competency, improved retention and data gathered in our regular eNPS surveys.
Since we started explicitly championing PDPs, we've seen a spike in the number of PDP meetings booked in with managers across the team. Employees from every team have stepped forward to share their skills in weekly lunch-n-learns on Zoom, which are consistently well-attended by 20+ people. So far 60 people across the company have taken part in our internal mentorship programme, where more experienced employees are partnered with more junior members to encourage them and to help carve out their career path. On top of this, we hold monthly drop-in coaching sessions where leaders across the business can come and share their experiences and concerns, and get advice from experienced coaches. We regularly inform existing team members and new joiners about the wide range of learning resources available to them, so they can seek out the skills they want to develop.
We hold ourselves to account on these values and objectives in several ways, including our termly eNPS surveys, focus groups and meetings with our People partners and team leaders to make sure nothing and noone falls through the cracks. These sources of feedback tell us where employees want to develop, what skills they want to learn and how these learning experiences can underpin our success as a business. As we reflected on our new needs as a scale-up rather than a startup, we built in new role levels and transparent progression pathways to make MyTutor a place that rewards talent and development through learning. To support progression, we have a PDP framework which everyone is encouraged to write up with their manager, so they can develop themselves in a structured and consistent way. Learning is encouraged and supported equally amongst our team leads, managers and SLT as much as it is with junior hires. Our L&D team regularly meet with our leadership and managers to support them in creating our team of curious learners, emphasising the positive impact of learning on motivation, retention and performance.
Our culture is driven by our behaviours, which are "be an energy giver", "understand the why", "be proactive", "act like an owner" and "be constructively candid". These work together with our values, which are "commitment", "compassion" and "curiosity". We previously only had four behaviours, but after a review and retros with employees we added in "be constructively candid", and launched our values this year. We ensure every person interviewed has a values-centred interview to make sure they can contribute to our culture. This stage is always with someone outside of the hiring department, so as to help with bias.
Our consumer brand is the most recognised tutoring brand in the industry. We have an "excellent" Trustpilot score of 4.9/5, and over 250,000 5 star reviews on our site. Our brand personality is "Authentic", "Friendly" and "Human" - and we use these pillars to make sure MyTutor is an accessible and trustworthy brand that is honest with our customers. We're helping families and schools find the best tutors for their teens, and we're not afraid to be passionate, funny and real in the process. The great thing about our culture is that as we've scaled, we've continued to reflect these traits internally, which make MyTutor an inclusive, passionate and fun place to work. While we have a strong eNPS of 63- which we test termly - and a strong sense that we reflect our brand values from the inside out, at the end of 2021 we agreed that we weren't making this clear to potential hires. And so we updated our employer brand. After discussing with our team how they would describe our culture, and re-established how we want to talk about it externally, we re-created all of our employer brand assets to reflect this and our values. This included a new Life at MyTutor page, we re-worded how we describe our culture in our job descriptions, and we produced three videos where SLT and other members of our team talk about our culture and our mission.
From the get-go, our team has engaged enthusiastically with our learning hub, and our weekly lunch and learns consistently have 20+ attendees. Since we offered more support in how to use our L&D budget, many more people have taken advantage of it. Similarly, the number of PDPs completed since we doubled down on encouraging them and supporting everyone in how to create one, the majority of employees across the business have a PDP in place.
Best of all, we've kept our empowering culture of feedback as our team has trebled in size, and we see our values of "radical candour" and "curiosity" and our encouraged behaviour to "be proactive" reflected across the business. The introduction of our company values as well as our pre-existing behaviours, and the clear communication of what these are, why we've chosen them and what reflecting them looks like from our leadership has made this possible. Our SLT has been instrumental in defining our values and behaviours, with particular enthusiasm to see "curiosity" and a culture of learning to be what defines us as a company. As we build out our learning hub, our SLT will also be shaping our course "Leadership the MyTutor Way", which will help reinforce these values and behaviours at every level and within every department.
When the need for online tuition sky-rocketed in response to school closures, remote learning and exam changes in 2020, we scaled to meet the demand. As a team, we've grown from 50 employees to 280, and we've prioritised making MyTutor a great place to work every step of the way. From scrappy startup to successful scale-up, we've made sure to create a working environment where everybody feels supported, psychologically safe and able to do their best work. From helping existing employees adapt to changes, to onboarding 230 new joiners, we've provided remote and in-person wellbeing initiatives to suit everyone's unique needs. So whether an employee fits in their work around childcare, feels more comfortable working from home, or needs the buzz of an office, we make it work for them. We know that psychological health is just as important as physical health, and through our culture we prioritise both above all else.
As covid regulations relax, we're continuing to make MyTutor a workplace that works for everyone with a flexible hybrid working environment that includes in-person wellbeing initiatives, policies and benefits available to all. We know that the pandemic has been a challenging time for everyone in terms of wellbeing - whether they've been balancing work with childcare, felt isolated in a houseshare or had to be extra careful to avoid covid.
International working - All employee can workabord for up to 80 days per year
Working from anywhere in UK - Flexible working with HQ in London but hubs across all the UK
Time for me day - Wellbeing days each year for employees to relax
Summer early finish - Early finishes every Friday throughout summer
Enhanced Maternity and Paternity leave
Pregnancy loss policy which supports parents through pregnancy loss and IVF treatment
Budget assigned to committees such as EDI, Wellbeing and social
We're pleased to regularly receive positive feedback from our team which tells us we're going in the right direction when it comes to their wellbeing. We run an eNPS survey every 4 months, and in our latest results, 98% of employees agreed their manager or someone at work cares about them as a person.
Our People team checks in with everyone after 1 month, when they pass their probation after 3 months, and when they celebrate their 1 year and 3 year anniversaries. This is an important way in which we check in on how each person is finding their role, their experience of the company, and how well they're managing their wellbeing. We send out a survey and book in a chat with a member of the people team to discuss how they're getting on, and any challenges they've faced professionally or personally. Our HR platform Hibob notifies them of all of these milestone anniversaries, so noone can fall through the cracks.
Key themes from these check-ins are then shared with the wider people team so we can create actions and support them holistically. Here are some of the things our employees have had to say in these check-ins: “I’ve never had a company where I feel so supported”, “The work culture is really open and supportive”, and “you can be whoever you want to be and bring your whole self to work and that’s supported, accepted and nurtured.”
From our Mental Health First Aiders' feedback on their drop-in sessions, we see that many people feel comfortable enough to take advantage of them, with every session helping someone feel listened to and helped to make a plan of action to help them out.
Our Wellbeing Committee works to help champion wellbeing at the company and make sure everyone's voices are heard. In the summer, each member of the committee joined a team meeting across the business to hear everyone's experiences of workplace wellbeing, and pick their brains for ideas on how we can support their welfare. The ideas and insights from these workshops led to new initiatives such as our Wellbeing Wednesdays - every wednesday the wellbeing committee spotlight a topic to help support the team, this could be a newsletter, resource or a panel talk, lunch-and-learn and our very first Wellbeing Week, which involved a programme of workshops, expert talks and activities to encourage everyone to prioritise their mental and physical wellbeing in the workplace. Some of these events included meditation sessions, a wellbeing-themed Fika (aka afternoon tea break) and a financial coaching workshop. We also sent wellbeing boxes to everyone, and created a company focus around scheduling regular breaks in their work calendars so everyone makes time each day to pause and relax.
On a more systematic level, managers have weekly 1:1s with their direct reports which includes a check in on their wellbeing. Our People Partners meet regularly with managers across the business to support on any issues that come up including team wellbeing.
Our HR platform also tells us when people hit their anniversaries each year after that, which we always announce company-wide; at our Termly Business Reviews, all anniversaries are celebrated and marked by a speech from their manager telling everyone what impact they have been able to have on the business and their colleagues. Then on a more regular basis, our People Partners work with managers to make sure they are consistent in their approach, prioritising wellbeing and development, and checking in as often as they should.
MyTutor is the UK's leading online tuition platform. Our mission is to make life-changing tuition available to every child. We believe that tuition is life-changing because it helps children achieve their academic potential, as well as providing them with mentors to boost their motivation, confidence and ambition. All of our tutors are current students and recent grads from UK universities - this means that as well as having deep subject knowledge, they have recent exam experience, and double as approachable mentors who teens love to learn from. We make tuition more affordable and accessible for those who can afford it through our B2C offering, and free for those who can't through our Schools Programme. At the same time, we provide regular and rewarding work for university students and grads, giving them valuable transferable skills for their CVs, and a source of income to support them at this stage of their lives. Since we started in 2013, we've given over 2,000,000 lessons and impacted over 100,000 lives, and by 2025 our goal is to have impacted 1,000,000 lives.
London
EdTech
Bertie Hubbard
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