Top Employer Awards
The Top Employer Awards celebrate the very best companies for flexible, family-friendly and inclusive working.
The 2025 Top Employer Awards
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.
Closing date for entries is the 25th October 2024.
2025 Award Categories
Best for Mental Health and Wellbeing
To be eligible for the Best for Mental Health and Wellbeing Award employers should demonstrate initiatives aimed at helping employees with health issues who want to remain in or return to the workplace. Read more >>
Best for Diversity & Inclusion
To be eligible for the Best for Diversity and Inclusion Award employers should 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 should demonstrate how they promote and manage flexible working Read more >>
Best for Family Support, sponsored by Harper James
Sponsored by Harper James
To be eligible for the Family Support Award employers need to show how their policies and practice support working families and carers. 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 Age Diversity
To be eligible for the Best for Age Diversity Award, employers should provide details of what they do and how it helps people over the age of 50 and under the age of 25. 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, sponsored by Vistry Group
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 >>
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Benchmark your entry
View 2024 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
Salma Shah is the Founder and Director of the award-winning Mastering Your Power, a certified coach training and inclusive leadership programme designed with a wider systemic lens of diversity, inclusion, belonging and equity.
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.
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.
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.
Kim Chaplain
Associate Director for Work, Centre for Ageing Better
Kim is Associate Director for Work, supporting one of the Centre for Ageing Better’s priority goals of Fulfilling work.
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.
Ashanti Bentil-Dhue
Ashanti Bentil-Dhue is not only a visionary business leader but also a renowned expert in diversity and inclusion, currently leading the charge as the CEO of the Competence Centre for Workplace Equity (CCWE). Her journey in the DEI space spans over a decade, marked by an unwavering dedication to using competency based practices and initiating meaningful change across global workplaces. Her leadership at CCWE is characterized by innovative approaches using technology like AI and insightful perspectives, which have significantly contributed to enhancing inclusivity and profitability within numerous organizations.
Her commitment to challenging the status quo and pioneering competence-based approaches with global organisations has cemented her reputation as a pivotal change-maker in the field.
Outside her CEO responsibilities, she actively participates in professional networks, further amplifying her impact by educating and inspiring others about the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Ashanti Bentil-Dhue’s leadership embodies a profound belief: that a robust commitment to diversity and inclusion requires clarity, competency and a compliance driven approach – making her the ideal founder to lead and influence in this evolving sector.
