A Home for our People

With over 11,000 incredible colleagues across the UK, we’re all about creating a home for our people – a place where they feel welcome, engaged, safe and fairly rewarded for all the amazing things they do – wherever they work in our business.

Here’s how we help our colleagues feel right at home through Learning, Thriving and Belonging. Let’s peek behind the curtains and take a closer look.

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Learning

We promote a culture of learning and development that supports business growth, while keeping our colleagues engaged and motivated.

We offer multiple internal learning and development programmes, including strong growth potential colleagues, role model leadership and the data literacy academy, to support our colleagues in preparing to take their next step or developing their skillset.

As part of this, we have developed our early careers offering to include graduate, apprenticeship, internship and placement opportunities. They have been developed to support long-term business growth aspirations, and we encourage colleagues within the business to participate in them.

Thriving

We apply pay principles based on reward that is ‘fair, relevant and personalised’ throughout the business. We also invest in additional colleague financial wellbeing support.

In FY24 we introduced a new benefit – all our colleagues now have Life Assurance of ￡10,000 with the opportunity to annually increase this at their own expense. This is in addition to our existing competitive benefits package which includes colleague discount, paid birthday day off and a range of discounts on multiple other retailers from supermarkets, to travel and insurance.

Since 2020 we have also provided a ‘colleague support fund’, providing grants or loans to colleagues who are experiencing financial hardship. In FY24 we funded ￡200k of these grants / loans.

Alongside this, we also provide salary advance, allowing colleagues to take 50% of their earned pay when they wish, rather than waiting until the end of the month. We understand that being paid once a month doesn’t suit everyone, and this can avoid expensive alternatives like overdraft fees.

Belonging

We are committed to making our colleagues feel more connected to our business and shared values through improved engagement, health and wellbeing training and support, and a more strategic approach to diversity and inclusion.

In FY24, we bought this to life by defining the pillars of our belonging strategy, to ensure that our culture celebrates the uniqueness of all our people.

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One of the ways in which we ensure everyone feels that they belong is through our colleague networks. The networks (gender equality, ethnicity & race, disability & neurodiversity and LGBTQ+) were first set up in 2021. Each is sponsored by members of the Dunelm Leadership Team, and co-chairs are voted in by other members. Each network has a vision, goals and a calender of events that colleagues can sign up to. They also have voices in decision-making in relevant policies. Our networks empower our colleagues to make a positive difference within the business.

In FY24, we launched our REACH programme – a new initiative aimed at supporting colleagues from ?underrepresented ethnic groups to build confidence, have a growth mindset and career exploration. During the graduation ceremony, colleagues discussed having more confidence to strive to do different things they previously had not perceived as possible.

Whether its empowering growth, rewarding hard work, or making sure everyone feels like they belong, we’re always looking for ways to improve our colleagues’ experience. We’re building more than just a workplace – we’re building a home for our people.

Thank you for tuning into our Good and Circular series. You can read our full sustainability report here - https://corporate.dunelm.com/media/ddwbib5k/dunelm_sustainabilityreport2024.pdf