Eat the Elephant Improve Engagement and Performance at CEME Conference Centre

CEME Conference Centre is an Award winning, ‘Gold Accredited’ Events and Conference venue in East London and part of the Centre for Engineering and Manufacturing Excellence – a Regeneration Charity focusing on business growth, education, skills and learning in the Thames Gateway. The Conference Centre has enjoyed enormous success in the past few years growing the business by 250% in under three years; achieving Accredited In Meetings gold standard with the MIA – the only venue in East London or Essex to do so; being accepted into Conference Centres of Excellence; becoming a World Host venue for exceptional customer service; achieving an NPS score in September 2015 of 94; and, in October 2015, winning the Havering Business Awards for outstanding Customer Care.

Much of this success is down to the quality and commitment of the conference centre team and their level of employee engagement achieved, in no small part, through the partnership enjoyed with Eat The Elephant. At the beginning of 2105, CEME appointed Eat the Elephant to undertake their team development with the assurance that bringing them in would contribute substantially to making a good team even better by improving not only individual performance and engagement, but also team achievement, customer satisfaction and business development.

To this end, CEME embarked on a Team development programme over the course of a number of months with Eat The Elephant that began with employees completing on-line PPA profiles followed up with individual employee evaluation sessions, ‘1 to 1’ coaching and team development days. There were two key statements adopted to underpin the development and drive participation – ‘Engagement, Ownership, Performance’ and, for the team development day – ‘Responsibility, Action, Achievement’.

The results of the programme have truly been phenomenal with the engagement of all employees rising to the highest echelons comparable with any ‘high performing’ team; quality standard compliance improving to over 95%; the achievement of an NPS score for the business of 94 and ‘exceeding expectations’ at 66%; and financial targets for the year not only met, but substantially exceeded.

All in all, the employee engagement programme undertaken with Eat the Elephant has proved enormously successful and a guaranteed route for our organisation in improving employee engagement and business performance.