Policies and practices that support and enrich employees, improve diversity, equity and inclusion, support employee retention and recruitment and positively impact our stakeholders and communities.
Alignment with UN SDGs
Our people bring great talent, energy and experience to the business and are vital to Rightmove’s success. Making Rightmove a great pace to work is a management objective and recognises that our people are our most valued asset.
Employee engagement
We conduct a ‘Have your Say’ people survey twice a year to gauge how our employees feel about working for Rightmove. The survey results are followed up by every manager, supported by our HR team. We place great importance on the feedback of our employees, and we are proud of the fact that our ‘Great Place to Work’ score was 87% for 2022.
Recruiting people with the right skills, capabilities and experience to build our business and embrace the ‘HOWs’ is essential to Rightmove’s success. The market for individuals with technology and customer-centric skills remains highly competitive and challenging, with high salary inflation. We have further strengthened our HR team with talent acquisition partners with a focus on direct recruiting for all roles. We work continuously to maintain a happy, supportive working environment and providing a comprehensive range of benefits to attract and retain the best people.
In 2022, Rightmove provided employees with an average of 17 hours of training. In total, 3,833 hours of mandatory training were delivered, primarily covering data protection, information security and FCA compliance, and 7,660 hours of developmental training, including performance management, customer experience and sales training. Online employee support and engagement webinars have continued to augment training workshops, with monthly Town Halls (not included in the table below), hosted by our CEO continuing to be popular and well attended. The majority of our customer support and sales training is provided in-house by expert-led trainers. The annual cost of training in 2022 was £883 per employee, including all external trainer and platform costs but excluding our own trainers’ employment costs.
Rightmove offers a comprehensive range of competitive benefits to our employees.
Pensions
A group stakeholder pension plan is offered to all employees, under which they can contribute 3% or more of their salary and Rightmove contributes 6%.
Employee share schemes
To enable employees to benefit directly from their contribution to Rightmove’s success, we offer two all-employee share plans, which help align the interests of employees with those of our shareholders.
Hybrid working policy
In 2022, having considered employee feedback, and following a trial of three days a week working from home, we have continued with our hybrid working policy, which allows employees the flexibility to work up to three days a week from home. Teams collectively chose the two days per week to be in the office together to optimise time together. Our offices remain open five days a week for any employees who prefer to work from the office. We also support other flexible working arrangements, part-time working and reduced hours to allow our employees to balance their home and work commitments.
Health & Safety
The health and wellbeing of all employees and visitors to our sites is a priority for the business, and during the year we have ensured that our premises continue to provide a safe working environment. Rightmove has a fully compliant Health and Safety Policy and appropriate insurance for all its employees. We also ensure the maintenance of plant and equipment, safe handling and use of all substances and the prevention of accidents and causes of ill-health.
We are pleased to report that we have had no fatalities or serious injuries reported during the year, and there was no lost time due to work-related incidents or work-related occupational disease.
In response to the requirements of the 2018 Corporate Governance Code (Code), the Board agreed that an alternative, tailored approach to employee engagement would be appropriate for Rightmove and that our Non Executive Directors (NEDs) should be involved in a variety of engagement sessions with Rightmove teams to gain direct feedback from employees.
In 2022, our Non-Executive Directors have attended informal employee engagement sessions with our teams in Milton Keynes and London.
Employee engagement with our Executive Directors has continued throughout the year with monthly Town Hall webinars for all employees, hosted by the Chief Executive and members of the Senior Leadership Team. The Board receives feedback from the CEO at each Board meeting on the questions and issues raised at these meetings, in addition to updates from our HR team.
The key messages and insights from the Chief Executive’s Town Hall updates during the year have supplemented our Non-Executive Directors’ understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing Rightmove’s employees and informed some of the Board’s decision-making, particularly in relation to our investment in technology, remote and hybrid working and recruitment policies.
In 2022, we have continued to promote inclusion and diversity in our workforce and have increased our focus on ethnic diversity.
In line with the Parker Review recommendation that all FTSE 100 Boards should have at least one director from an ethnically diverse background by 2021, we are pleased to confirm that Rightmove has three out of eight (38%) Directors from ethnically diverse backgrounds as at 31 December 2022.
Rightmove has an all-inclusive hiring process, ensuring that individual names, places of study and gender references are removed from CVs. We have continued our ‘someone like me’ initiative to ensure interviewees can feel represented, and we talk about diversity and inclusivity at Rightmove during interviews. We have expanded our direct hiring platforms to include those that attract a higher number of candidates identifying with a protected characteristic.
Rightmove is committed to its policy of giving full and fair consideration to people with disabilities for all vacancies. We continue to support and retain employees who become disabled during their employment with us.
89% of our employees were happy to volunteer information about their ethnicity, choosing from 23 ethnic categories (defined by ACAS) with only 7.4% of Group employees selecting ‘prefer not to say’.
Our aim is to have an employee base representative of the wider UK population, including in each hourly pay quartile. Data has been collected according to the 18-way profile used in the 2011 UK census, however, to ensure anonymity we have analysed our employee data under the five summary groups used in the Government’s Race Disparity Audit, 2017.
Twelve percent (12%) of Rightmove’s employees are foreign nationals.
| White | Mixed/Multiple ethnic groups | Asian/Asian British | Black/African/ Caribbean/ Black British | Other ethnic group | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UK Population(1) | 86.0% | 2.2% | 7.5% | 3.3% | 1.0% | |
| Rightmove | 80.3% | 4.7% | 8.0% | 4.9% | 2.1% | |
| Pay Quartile | Top | 81.7% | 4.8% | 10.6% | 1.0% | 1.9% |
| Upper middle | 78.8% | 4.8% | 10.6% | 4.8% | 1.0% | |
| Lower middle | 79.3% | 2.7% | 4.5% | 9.0% | 4.5% | |
| Lower | 81.5% | 6.5% | 6.5% | 4.6% | 0.9% | |
(1) Taken from the 2011 Census date, the most reliable dataset available
The percentage of Rightmove employees who are foreign nationals is 6%.
We are partnering with Generating Genius to support the next generation of STEM talent. Our partnership is providing sponsorship and mentoring support to young people who are underrepresented in higher education and industry, particularly in STEM careers. Our partnership with Generating Genius has been very successful in the first year and has inspired us to expand our participation in 2022.
As at 31 December 2022, female employees made up 45% (2021: 40%) of the Rightmove leadership team(1). The Board is keen to strengthen and maintain female representation in senior roles and Rightmove is a contributor to the FTSE Women Leaders Review, the successor to the Hampton-Alexander Review.
Our commitment to gender equality emanates from our leadership team and 50% of our Board consists of female Directors, with equal representation at an Executive Director level. This, combined with our strong female leadership team representation, resulted in Rightmove being placed eleventh in the 2022 FTSE Women Leaders table.
A breakdown by gender of the number of Directors and employees as at 31 December 2022 by various classifications as required by the Companies Act is set out below:
(1) The FTSE Women Leaders cohort comprises members of the Executive Committee and their direct reports.
(2) The Senior Leadership Team comprises the FTSE Women Leaders cohort, excluding the Executive Directors.
Rightmove has published its gender pay gap report, based on data at April 2022, when the split of male/female employees was 53%/47% respectively.
Rightmove employees are paid equally for working in the same jobs and we are pleased to report that men and women are almost equally represented in our wider workforce.
As in previous years, the gender pay gap is driven by the gender mix across the highest and lowest pay quartiles. Women are less well represented in the higher-paid senior management and technology teams and men are under-represented in the lower-paid customer experience teams. While we have continued with actions to close the gap, disappointingly the mean gap widened slightly over 2021 and 2022 as the job market became very tight, leading to a rapid rise in salaries, with the stiffest competition for talent being in our technologyteams, which are also our most male-based team. The competitive market also impacted existing employees’ salaries.
We have continued to take actions to close our pay gap as part of our longer-term action plan, which are having a positive impact:
We remain focused on developing our recruitment strategy with more emphasis on our direct hiring to ensure we represent the diversity of our employee brand.
Below is our gender pay gap at April 2022. Some of the actions on which we continue to focus our efforts to improve our gender balance going forward are also set out.
Difference between male and female pay
| 2022 | 2021 | |||
| Mean | Median | Mean | Median | |
| Difference in hourly rate of pay((1) | 26.2% | 32.0% | 23.8% | 33.5% |
| Difference in bonus pay(2) | 66.6% | 35.80% | 43.9% | 0.0% |
(1) Calculated using Rightmove Group Limited pay data from April 2022.
(2) Calculated using 12 months of Rightmove Group Limited bonus pay data to 5 April 2022. Both our mean and median bonus pay gap continues to be influenced by gender, with more men participating in bonus schemes than women.
The bonus pay gaps have increased significantly, which is due in part to the timing of the Deferred Share Bonus (‘DSB’) exercises (DSB awards are included at point of exercise rather than grant at which point male representation in the relevant teams was higher).
We work hard to create an environment where everyone has the opportunity to build a career throughout the business and believe that our open, collaborative culture is key to that objective. We are committed to a number of actions to balance our teams in a fair and transparent way, including:
We are pleased to report that charitable donations, including matched funding and sponsorship, totalled £231,000 in 2022 (2021: £153,000). We aim over the next three years to double our charitable giving.
Through our charity partnership with youth homeless charity Centrepoint we donated funds to help with their Independent Living Programme, a project that helps young people into a rented home of their own. We provided data analysis on rental supply, demand and pricing dynamics to help inform their future local developments, and we helped them to use the reach of our platform to advertise their key fundraising messages.
We have a charity partnership with Caudwell Youth and Sofea in Milton Keynes aimed specifically at supporting local young at risk people to help them to get back into education and/or employment.
We have also supported smaller charities which are local to our offices, where our support can make a significant impact, including Willen Hospice and Harry’s Rainbow in Milton Keynes and Wearside Women in Need.
As a leading digital platform, Rightmove strives to provide a reliable, efficient and fair marketplace for our customers and consumers. Every modification to our platforms, every new service or innovation is tested to ensure it delivers a valuable service for our customers, protects consumer data and provides an engaging user experience.
Rightmove’s value to our customers goes beyond digital advertising solutions; we also offer tools and training to our customers to support them in running their businesses more efficiently. Rightmove Plus – included free of charge as part of all Rightmove membership packages – helps customers throughout the property marketing lifecycle and was used by over 90% of independent estate agents during 2022. The Best Price Guide, for example, a reporting tool within Rightmove Plus which helps agents to gather comparable properties to support their suggested property price, saves them up to an hour per market appraisal. The Best Price Guide alone was used over 17 million times in 2022, a 22% increase on 2021.
Rightmove’s culture of constant improvement and innovation helps to create more opportunities for our customers to identify potential new business. A good example of this is Opportunity Manager, which is a lead management tool available with our Optimiser package and is powered by an algorithm that is constantly learning and improving to intelligently spot the home hunters who are most likely to turn into potential home sellers in an agent’s area. The opportunity to get a head start on marketing to these potential vendors led to a third of Optimiser customers using Opportunity Manager at least once a week.
Our market-leading professional training programme, free to all members, remains an invaluable tool for our customers. Delivered in webinars, it was viewed by more than 14,000 property professionals, both live and through our on-demand service, and the topics covered in 2022 ranged from ‘economy’ and ‘winning more stock’ to ‘legislation across sales and lettings’. Our Rightmove Hub, which hosts all the material, had more than 1.4 million page views in the year.
In November, we were proud to launch a new Ofqual-regulated Level 3 certificate to estate and lettings agents – the Certificate for Estate and Lettings Agents (CELA). The training is free to Rightmove members (who pay only for the final exam) and is provided online, backed by a bespoke learning management system. It includes an overview of the industry, from experts, on the moving process, codes of practice, legislation and customer services, giving them an easy way to demonstrate their quality and credibility to sellers and landlords. By the end of the year, within six weeks of launch, over 1,700 agents had enrolled with momentum growing in to 2023.