Top Employer Awards
The Top Employer Awards celebrate the very best companies for diversity & inclusion, flexible working, career progression for women, mental health and family support.
The 2024 Top Employer Awards are open for entries.
Being shortlisted for or winning one of the WM People Top Employer Awards gives you an exclusive opportunity to share your progressive policies with prospective candidates. You can demonstrate that you are an employer of choice, helping you to attract the very best talent.
The awards ceremony will take place on the 6th February 2024 in London. The event is for shortlisted companies. Enter the awards and join us to celebrate success, share best practice and connect with like-minded professionals.
The awards are now closed for entry.
2024 Award Categories
Best for Mental Health
To be eligible for the Best for Mental Health Award employers needed to demonstrate initiatives aimed at protecting their employees mental health. Read more >>
Best for Diversity & Inclusion
To be eligible for the Best for D&I award employers had to demonstrate actions taken to ensure equality of opportunity for all. Read more >>
Best for Flexible Working
To be eligible for the Best for Flexible Working Award employers needed to demonstrate how they promote and manage flexible working and encourage a flexible culture in their organisation. Read more >>
Best for Family Support
To be eligible for the Family Support Award employers needed to show how their policies and practice support working families and carers. Read more >>
Best for Career Progression for Women
Sponsored by FSCS
To be eligible employers had to demonstrate initiatives aimed at developing women’s leadership potential, including women’s networks, mentoring initiatives, outreach, training and return to work programmes. Read more >>
Best SME Award
To be eligible for the SME award, organisations must show a real commitment to work helping employees balance home and work life. Read more >>
Best for Returners
To be eligible to apply for the Best for returners Award, organisations demonstrated that they have stand-out programmes or initiatives aimed at returners – those who have taken a career break and are looking to get back into the workplace. Read more >>
Best for Older Workers
To be eligible for The Best for Older Workers Award, employers provided details of what they do and how it helps older workers, including through metrics, how they are monitoring success and individual case studies which show impact. Read more >>
Best for Learning and Development*
To be eligible employers should demonstrate that they have created the right culture and environment for all individuals to learn and grow and to keep learning and upskilling, throughout their working lives. Read more >>
Best for Talent Attraction and Outreach*
To be eligible to apply for the Talent Attraction and Outreach Award, organisations should demonstrate that they are thinking creatively about outreach and recruitment in a difficult labour market. Read more >>
Special Innovation Award*
This award is for organisations that have a stand-out policy or initiative related to working parents, women’s career progression, older workers or flexible working that has/is having a demonstrable impact on its employees or the wider community. Read more >>
* New categories
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Benchmark your entry
View 2023 Top Employer Award winners. Download a copy of the Best Practice Report.
Gillian Nissim
Founder, WM People
A former Senior Communications Executive, Gillian has worked at a number of different organisations with very different cultures and attitudes towards family friendly working policies. After the birth of her second child she decided to set up her own company to cater for the businesses who did appreciate the vast experience and high calibre of professionals who had become parents, and wanted to find challenging and interesting jobs that offered more flexibility than traditional office-based, Monday – Friday, 9:00 – 5:00 jobs.
A graduate of Birmingham University, Gillian launched workingmums.co.uk in 2006, followed by workingdads.co.uk in 2018 and workingwise.co.uk in 2019.
Jennifer Liston-Smith
Head of Thought Leadership for Bright Horizons Work+Family Solutions.
For over 20 years, Jennifer has advised employers in banking, professional services, STEM and wider sectors on programmes to improve flexible working, wellbeing, inclusion, family-friendly programmes and gender parity. She is a sought-after speaker, writer, conference moderator and consultant on these topics and more.
Jennifer set-up, and for a decade led, the Coaching & Consultancy side of what became Bright Horizons Work+Family Solutions, defining best practice and ‘next practice’, designing interventions and evaluating their impact and ROI, developing coaches and coaching capability, originating and lead authoring the online Parental Leave Toolkit and Parental Leave Toolkit for Managers.
She now focuses on identifying overarching trends through research, through advising employers and translating these insights into solutions and practical actions. An Oxford graduate, Jennifer holds Masters degrees in both Law and Experimental Psychology and several qualifications and accreditations in coaching psychology and coaching supervision.
Salma Shah
Writer and Founder of Mastering your Power (www.masteringyourpower.com)
Based in London, UK she works with clients at all levels in public, private and voluntary sectors; supervises and trains other coaches; presents at events both in the UK and internationally.
David Dunbar
Head of Digital Workspace at the Department of Work and Pensions
David former roles include heading BT’s Flexible Working Services division, which offered a range of managed services around agile working, as well as owning BT’s own internal flexible working programme across 22 countries. He was also Head of Digital Workplace at Nationwide Building Society, responsible for introducing innovative environments and culture change, by bringing together HR, Property and IT to drive change across the organisation. In addition he has delivered consultancy around Digital Workplace, Dynamic Working and Workplace Transformation to public and private sector organisations of all shapes and size.
He is currently the Head of Digital Workspace at the Department of Work and Pensions, the UK’s largest public sector department, where he is responsible for the infrastructure to support new ways of working, for modernising the tools, desktop, and mobile solutions used by around 90,000 employees, and for delivering new office and hub space to support collaborative and agile working.
Andy Lake
Director, Flexibility.co.uk
Andy Lake is a specialist in Smart Working, and has worked on dozens of implementations and evaluations across the private, public and voluntary sectors. He is the author of Smart Flexibility Management book and numerous other publications researching and providing guidance on Smart Working and on the future of work. Andy has worked as an advisor with the UK Cabinet Office and the European Commission. He is the author of the British Standards PAS3000: Code of Practice for Smart Working, which all UK central government departments and agencies have to follow as they modernise working practices. Andy also runs the Smart Work Network (www.smart-work.net), a peer collaboration network for people implementing Smart Working in their organisations, and in October 2020 launched a European counterpart to this, Smart Work Europe.
Kim Chaplain
Associate Director for Work, Centre for Ageing Better
Kim has over 30 year of experience in the employment and skills sector spanning both operational and policy roles. She specialises in community engagement and regeneration and has extensive experience of fostering partnerships between local authorities and employment services in both the third and public sector.
In particular, she has worked with local partnerships to develop solutions tackling long term worklessness. In her early career, Kim spent time working for The Prince’s Trust as the Northern Director of the Volunteers Programme in some of the most economically deprived areas of the North of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. She has worked at a national level on a number of central governments training schemes including as the Director of the Job Transition Service at Jobcentre Plus, tackling the impact of significant redundancies.
She was the Director of the East London City Strategy Pathfinder, leading the employment and skills agenda, including sub regional programmes with a combined value of £59m, for the 5 Olympic host boroughs over the period of construction and hosting of London 2012.
Most recently she was the Director of Charitable Activity at the Mayor’s Fund for London, a social mobility charity launched by Boris Johnson in his first term as Mayor of London.
Dr Clare Kelliher
Professor of Work & Organisation, Cranfield University
Clare Kelliher, BSc, MA, PhD is Professor of Work and Organisation at Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University. Clare holds a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from London Business School, an MA in Industrial Relations from the University of Warwick and a first degree in management from the University of Surrey.
Her research interests centre around the organisation of work and the management of the employment relationship. She has a long-standing interest in flexible working and recently directed a major project concerned with examining the impact of flexible working on performance, sponsored by seven companies. She has also recently completed a project looking at employee engagement in multi-national organisations, funded by the US Society for HRM Foundation.
Clare is the author of many published papers and book chapters and regularly speaks at national and international conferences. Her recent book, New Ways of Organising Work: developments, perspectives and experiences, co-edited with Julia Richardson was published by Routledge. In 2012 she also published a text book on Strategic HRM together with Katie Truss and David Mankin. She has considerable experience running management programmes and advising organisations both in the UK and overseas. She frequently acts as an external examiner for doctoral and Masters degrees at universities in the UK and overseas.
Jenny Garrett OBE
Jenny Garrett OBE is a Coach & Leadership Development Consultant. She is an experienced facilitator of programmes for managers, Directors and CEOs from a variety of organisations, including private and public sector.
Prior to this she held senior Marketing Roles for organisations such as Ashridge Business School, Hamptons International and Schroder Leasing.
Jenny’s specialist areas include:
Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging – ‘no longer counting people, but making people count’, exploring and appreciating difference, culture and beliefs to provide the best organisational solutions.
Leadership coaching – providing the challenge and support that can be missing for executives at the most senior levels of an organisation to keep them on track.
Team performance – through team coaching, enabling improved lines of communication, increased self-awareness and an understanding of others perceptions.
Jenny was awarded OBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours 2021 for services to Entrepreneurship and Women in Business. She has a Masters Degree MA (Management Learning & Leadership) Lancaster University. BA Honours Business, University of Westminster and Coaching Qualifications with Ashridge Business School and Lancaster University. She has the highest honorary award of ‘Companion’ from the Institute of Leadership and Management.
Jenny’s latest book is Equality vs Equity, tackling issues of race in the workplace.
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