HC-One, the UK’s largest care home provider of residential, nursing and dementia care, has launched a range of benefit and reward initiatives to support colleagues during the cost-of-living crisis.

The initiatives include a rewards platform offering discounts on purchases and providing broader wellbeing support, and the introduction of one of the UK’s leading financial wellbeing services, while providing insights and tools to help plan their finances.

John Handley, people director at HC-One, commented: “With the cost of living rising significantly, and everyone feeling the impact, we have a responsibility to support each other through these challenging times, starting with making sure every penny counts. We have established a new cost of living working group at HC-One where colleagues come together to share ideas and local practice to help us to understand what more as an organisation we can do to help through these challenging times.

“We are pleased to have launched a range of great new initiatives to date and are continuing to invest in further initiatives throughout 2023 and beyond to reward, support and develop our colleagues.”

HC-One launched its Benefits Reward Gateway at the end of last year which offers access to a range of benefits and rewards, including discounts on retailers, restaurants, cinemas and holidays.

The company has as rolled out access to Wagestream which enables colleagues to manage their budgeting, choose when they get paid, set aside money for a rainy day, get free financial coaching, pick up shopping discounts and save money on household bills – all in one smartphone app.

These initiatives follow HC-One’s investment of over £17 million in pay and rewards in 2022, to redesign its pay structures – its largest ever investment in pay. This change has resulted in wages for carers increasing by 11%, on average, which helped support over 70% of HC-One’s workforce to reach Foundation Living Wage during 2022.