A few months ago, we asked colleagues ship and shore to tell us about their experience of working for Carnival UK. Since then, we’ve shared our overall eNPS scores and following a deeper analysis of our results, we’re now able to share our company wide themes with you.
Across ship and shore, we were delighted to hear how passionate and proud you are to work for Carnival UK and our brands. You also love your colleagues. Here are some highlights:
“I love Cunard and I am able to reach my goals helping my family back home. I’ll always be grateful working with Cunard.”
“I love the people I work with and the team morale. I have a department who encourages me to succeed and celebrates success.”
“Strong culture and identity… Dynamic working environment, flexible working, diverse, culture focused, engagement driven.”
“There’s nothing I want to change. I just love working here because I can be myself. Thank you.”
Of course, there are always opportunities for us to improve. Fostering a strong culture is one of our top priorities and your feedback tells us which areas we need to focus on the most. Below are some of the themes and the actions we’re taking. Some of these actions are in progress, whereas others may need further exploration.
Our shoreside themes
Our eNPS score Our overall Carnival UK employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is 31, which you can read more about here.
Click on each headline to read more.
You told us that you’d like to see clearer accountabilities and that you want to feel more empowered to make decisions.
We’re continuing to review our ways of working at a senior level, and we’re also committed to developing our leaders at all levels through our Leadership and Management Essentials Programme. The programme is designed to ensure our colleagues are managed consistently, with a strong focus on empowerment, delegation and high performing teams.
We’re delighted to hear how ambitious you are and that you see Carnival UK as a great place to grow your long term career. However, you’d like to see clearer and more transparent career pathways.
We’re lucky to have so many talented colleagues in our business and we value the breadth of skills, backgrounds and experience you bring to Carnival UK. We promote internal opportunities each week through our Weekly Update and we very much see our role requirements as a guide, rather than a checklist.
Given how quickly the world, and workplace, is changing, we recognise that many career pathways are no longer linear. We encourage you to take an active role in your development and career growth.
Talk to your manager about your career aspirations and where they see your strengths supporting your ambitions. Think about developing or learning new skills, keeping up to date with trends and technology and finding opportunities to broaden your network. We have many resources available to support you – click here for more.
We’ll soon be asking for feedback on your experience as a candidate for internal roles so that we can improve on this. Our goal is that you always benefit from applying for a role internally, even if you’re not successful, you should learn something that supports your development.
We’ve updated our recruitment policy to be transparent about how we assess who’s the right person for the role. You can find that policy here.
You told us that in some areas, you feel that there is a lack of prioritisation which is impacting your workload and work life balance.
We’re continuing to review our ways of working at a senior level, and we’re also committed to developing our leaders at all levels through our Leadership and Management Essentials Programme. The programme is designed to ensure our colleagues are managed consistently, with a strong focus on empowerment, delegation and high performing teams.
We’re thrilled to hear how much you value and feel supported by your line manager, however you’ve told us that you don’t feel as connected with the senior leaders as you’d like to be, and you’d value more transparency and more opportunities to ask questions.
As this theme impacts different areas in different ways, each department will be exploring this further as part of their local action plan. We will bring the EEGs together to think about how we can make improvements across Carnival UK.
What about the results in my business area?
By now, you should have heard more about your local department results from your Employee Engagement Groups (EEGs), who have been working with senior leadership to create a set of meaningful actions for your area.
The themes on our ships
Read more about the eNPS score on our ships here.
You’ve told us that women are facing more challenges than men when it comes to wellbeing and speaking up on board.
This isn’t a theme we would like to see and we want you to know that we’re committed to addressing this. Progress is underway with a specialist team who have been assembled to better understand the issue and make recommendations. We’ve already started to look at a plan including behaviours towards women, health, hygiene and safety. If you have any feedback about how we can improve things for women onboard, please speak to your HR Manager.
You’ve told us that you don’t always feel that you have enough rest and recovery time to do your best work.
We’re considering how our jobs are designed to make sure what is being asked of you is realistic. There is a lot for us to think about so this may take some time, but we want you to know that we’re working on this.
To help us understand your working hours, please record your hours of work and rest accurately by swiping in and out at the start and end of each duty.
If your manager amends your worked hours or rest hours and you don’t agree that this is an accurate reflection, it’s important that you Speak Up – either to your Head of Department or HR Manager.
You’ve told us that there is a perception of favouritism on board, particularly when it comes to promotions.
We’ve recently reviewed our promotions process to make sure it’s fair. When someone is recommended for promotion, they are now added to our promotional pool. We have guidelines to follow and we have communicated these to our senior managers. When we select someone for a role, we have to consider the timing of their last tour and their embarkation port to make sure we make the right business decision. This means we can’t always promote in order.
For Cunard, we’re introducing Career Passports for larger departments over the coming months. You’ll be invited to apply to join a Career Passport and if your application is successful, you’ll begin a training programme for the role you’ve applied for. You’ll be assessed throughout the programme to make sure you’re progressing well and on completion, you’ll be added to our promotional pool. This ensures the right people are selected because they’ve demonstrated they have the right skills and behaviours.
It’s great to hear how much you value our approach about speaking up, however some of you still feel concerned that you won’t be treated fairly if you raise an issue.
An essential part of our culture is to encourage and empower our colleagues to Speak Up. We want to reassure you that we will never treat anyone unfairly for speaking up, regardless of rank, and we follow a clear and fair process when colleagues raise a concern.
We’ve recently created a Listen and Learn report, which illustrates the actions we’re taking from your feedback. We’ll also continue to reiterate the importance of speaking up on board and the avenues to do so. You can read more about how to Speak Up here.
You’ve told us that our leaders could be better role models for our Culture Essentials.
We’re in the process of exploring this theme through local action planning across each ship. We’re committed to developing our leaders at all levels and we’re in the early stages of exploring how we do this.
We’ve recently trialled a leadership development programme called Connect on Britannia. Our initial findings show that the programme has been a success, with high engagement from our SMT and Ops teams who took part. We’re also in the process of building a Leadership and Management Essentials framework for our ships. This will focus initially on our newly promoted managers to build confidence in their roles, and we’re planning to pilot this in the coming months.
What about the results for each ship?
Hopefully you’ll have heard about the results and focus areas for the ship you’re working on. Local action plans are managed by each ship’s Senior Management Team (SMT) and will be in place by June.
What’s happening next?
We’ll run our Pulse and Life on Board surveys again in September, so we can understand how we’re doing against our action plans.
For Life on Board, we’ll be moving to a twice-a-year survey (rather than quarterly), to give our SMT on board more time to make improvements between surveys and to bring our ships in line with other brands across Carnival Corporation.