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ORH recognised as one of the UK’s Best Workplaces in 2022!

This week we were delighted to be listed as one of the best small companies to work for in the UK by Great Place to Work®. We ranked 12th out of 80 Certified™ companies in their annual list, an incredible achievement of which we are hugely proud as an organisation.

At ORH we have always placed great value in our company culture, the skills and development of our staff and the way we work together to deliver high-quality projects to the public sector. To see this officially recognised in this manner is very rewarding.

To be considered eligible for Best Workplace™ recognition, companies first had to meet the Great Place to Work-Certified™ standard of accreditation. Once Certified™, each company undergoes a rigorous assessment of their culture, during which review any anomalies in survey responses, news, and financial performance of each business to ensure there aren’t any extraordinary reasons to believe we couldn’t trust a company’s survey results. More details on the awards are available here:
https://www.greatplacetowork.co.uk/awards/uks-best-workplaces/uks-best-workplaces-2022/#Small

We would like to thank Great Place to Work for this recognition and for hosting a fantastic awards dinner in London. Most importantly, we are grateful for the support of our staff in delivering a thriving and enthusiastic work environment, which we can now officially say is one of the Best Workplaces™ in the country!

ORH has been voted one of the UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Wellbeing

ORH has been recognised as a UK’s Best Workplace™ for Wellbeing by Great Place to Work®.  We’re one of the top 50 companies on the Small organisations list.

See the full list here.

To determine the UK’s Best Workplaces™ list, Great Place to Work® culture experts analysed thousands of employee surveys, assessing their holistic experiences of wellbeing at work through fundamental facets of employee wellbeing, including work-life balance, sense of fulfilment, job satisfaction, psychological safety and financial security.

Evaluations also included an assessment of how well ORH was able to deliver a consistent employee experience across the entire company.

To have been considered one of the UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Wellbeing, ORH also had to:

  • Achieve Great Place to Work® certification in 2021
  • Meet the minimum Trust Index™ threshold of 85% for the small business size category

At ORH, we place strong emphasis on developing the skills of our employees through exposure to interesting projects that have a real-life impact.  We pride ourselves on our approachability and strongly value the different skillsets of our staff.  As such, we’re incredibly proud to be ranked among the 250 organisations on the UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Wellbeing list, demonstrating that our people are truly at the heart of everything we do.  

The Impact of Covid-19 on Sport Participation

As leisure centres and sport clubs begin to re-open across the UK, ORH takes a look at the impact that Covid-19 has had on sport participation.

Sport participation data from Sport England’s Active Lives survey is crucial for calculating the demand from the population for Sport England and sportscotland’s Facility Planning Model (FPM), which ORH operates and maintains. However, for a third of this year, there’s been no participation in activities involving indoor facilities such as, swimming, badminton and squash, and no team sports (at amateur level). So, what have we been doing instead, and will we maintain this behaviour?

On 23 March 2020 the British public were instructed to ‘stay at home’ but allowed one form of outdoor exercise each day such as running, walking or cycling. This caused massive disruption to physical activity. Sport England began monitoring the change in activity levels with weekly surveys through April and May, and monthly surveys in June and July.

In Sport England’s first survey, for the week 3-6  April, walking proved to be the most popular activity undertaken for 59% of adults. With gyms and clubs closed, 44% of adults took part in fitness classes and activities online and offline, or just exercised informally in their homes instead. Activities such as running were undertaken by 18% of adults, and 8% cycled.

After guidance on the number of outdoor exercise periods was lifted on 13 May, we reached peak activity levels in the week 15-18  May. The proportion of adults cycling doubled from the first week to 16%, almost two-thirds of adults (65%) were walking, and one-fifth of adults were running.

In July, with restrictions easing and more activities like golf and tennis becoming available, the proportion of people walking had reduced to 58%, similar to the pre-lockdown level.  The proportion of people doing home-based activities, which had peaked at the beginning of May at 48%, fell to 34%. However, cycling and running have managed to maintain some improvement since the start of lockdown, with 14% of adults cycling and 20% of adults running in July.

So, will athletes return to their previous patterns of sport participation or continue with the alternative activities discovered in lockdown? There definitely seems to be an intention to return to the same activities as pre-lockdown, but also to do more walking, running, home-based fitness and water sports. We’ll just have to wait for the next batch of data in 2021 to find out if people actually do this.

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