As Incentive is one of a very few medium sized businesses in the facilities management sector able to offer a fully self-delivered multi-service solution we often find ourselves tendering against the big players.  What we lack in scale we need to make up in other areas and the culture of our business is playing an increasingly important role.

For the past couple of years we have been working hard to embody a culture of ‘trusted advisor’ where our teams are encouraged to really understand the operations, get close to our clients and develop creative thought through solutions. Underpinning this is a unique training and development programme, created in conjunction with our training partners, Positive Change. This bespoke training is designed to help promote the culture of the business, whilst also giving people the additional skills and knowledge to enable them to unlock their full potential.

There is no doubt that we have reaped the benefits of prioritising the training and development of our workforce. Staff that believe their company offers excellent training opportunities are generally less likely to leave their jobs than employees that feel their training opportunities are somewhat limited. As a result we have witnessed year-on-year growth in staff retention, whilst our ability to attract the very best recruits continues to grow.

We are quite simply playing to our strengths. We aren’t large enough to carry the overhead of a large HR and training department but nor do we have the kind of bureaucracy which means that everything has to be prescriptive.

Our business culture is ‘freedom within a framework’ meaning that as long as the legal, financial and client stakeholder requirements are met then it is down to the individual teams how they achieve this. We find this helps people to develop faster and better and enables us to promote from within and reward loyalty and hard work.

In the service sector people are the foundation of any business and can be a company’s greatest asset. At Incentive we put our trust into our team and empower them to deliver innovative, progressive solutions to maximise value for customers. This culture is invaluable for the business as we face the ongoing challenge of differentiating ourselves in the marketplace and staying one step ahead.