Gratterpalm is a leading retail marketing agency, creating everything from award-winning advertising campaigns to point-of-sale and other promotional material for an impressive portfolio of well-known high street names.

Gratterpalm has a very active HR department, led by HR Director, Helen Saunders. Helen is not only responsible for staff recruitment and other day-to-day HR issues but also for looking at various ways of further enhancing Gratterpalm’s considerable successes through the performance of its employees. To achieve this Helen and her colleagues employ outside consultants such as MR Dynamics for support with particular projects.

“We first came across MRD in 2004 and were impressed with them after using them for a series of Insights management development workshops,” said Helen. “Since then we kept in touch regarding further possible projects and they became involved with Gratterpalm again early in 2008 when we decided to assess exactly what our employees, of around 100, thought about the company, the management, their office facilities and many other issues.

“Even though general morale was good, we didn’t actually know how they felt. The result was the roll out of the Gratterchatter survey, compiled, implemented and evaluated by MRD, which produced an excellent response,” said Helen. “The survey was far reaching and covered everything from opinions on management and training to salaries and in-house kitchen facilities!

“Not only was the response rate 100% - with the majority of our team responding within 24 hours – but the results were extremely positive, with 85% confirming they thought Gratterpalm was a very good place to work.” She added that the survey was a great measure of employee engagement and will work as a great benchmark in the future to track improvements in key areas.

“We have already taken a number of comments on board – running employee workshops to set out where we are going as a company and feedback actions to the agency, increasing employee training, reviewing our employee recognition and committing to the creation of a lunch/chill out area within the building, for instance.

“All this has come out as a result of this one survey. It’s also boosted staff morale even further, as people really appreciated not only being asked for their views but seeing those views acted upon.”

On working with MRD Helen said, “MR Dynamics are very genuine, personable people…very easy to work with. Their fees are also very competitive! Their development of the Gratterchatter survey and the resultant response has been instrumental in allowing us to set our long-term HR agenda. We certainly intend to use MRD again, on a follow up survey to Gratterchatter 08 and we already have a team away-day arranged for next month.”