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 88% for 2023.
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.
Learning and Development is part of working at Rightmove and is designed to equip managers and employees with the necessary skills to excel in their roles and to provide exceptional service to our customers and consumers. In 2023, Rightmove provided its employees with an average of 17 hours of training. 100% of employees at Rightmove were offered training. The total number of training hours provided in 2023 was 12,617 hours, including 4,621 hours of mandatory training and 7,996 hours of technical development training. The average training cost per employee was £604.
Rightmove offers a comprehensive range of competitive benefits to our employees.
Pensions
A group stakeholder pension plan is offered to all employees, under which Rightmove offers a 7% contribution where employees contribute 4% or more of their salary.
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 2023, 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 2023, 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 2023, 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 2023.
Please turn to our latest Annual Report for full details about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Rightmove.
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.
Of our employee base, 89% have volunteered information about their ethnicity, choosing from 23 ethnic categories (defined by ACAS) with only 11% of Group employees selecting ‘prefer not to say’ or leaving the answer blank.
Our aim is to have an employee base representative of the wider UK population, including in each hourly pay quartile. To ensure anonymity we have analysed our employee ethnicity data under the five summary groups used in the Government’s Race Disparity Audit, 2017.
As at September 2023, compared to the 2021 census figures, Rightmove is now broadly in line with the overall England and Wales population (excluding those employees who ‘prefer not to say’ or where no data is captured).
| Rightmove as at April 2023 | White | Mixed/Multiple ethnic groups | Asian/Asian British | Black/African/ Caribbean/ Black British | Other ethnic group | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| England & Wales Population (2021 Census) |
81.7% | 2.9% | 9.3% | 4.0% | 2.1% | |
| Rightmove | 81.9% | 3.6% | 8.5% | 4.0% | 2.0% | |
| Pay Quartile | Top | 83.9% | 2.5% | 11.0% | 0.8% | 1.7% |
| Upper middle | 77.4% | 4.0% | 12.9% | 4.0% | 1.6% | |
| Lower middle | 82.3% | 3.1% | 6.9% | 4.6% | 3.1% | |
| Lower | 84.0% | 4.8% | 3.2% | 6.4% | 1.6% | |
As at 31 December 2023, Female employees made up 51% (2022: 45%) of employees at Rightmove, and 39% of Rightmove Senior Management (2022: 39%).
The Rightmove plc Board of Directors consists of 50% women.
For further detail on Gender Diversity please turn to our latest Annual Report.
Rightmove has published its gender pay gap report, based on data at April 2023, 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.
Our latest Gender Pay Gap report is here.
We are pleased to report that charitable donations, including matched funding and sponsorship, totalled £243,000 in 2023 (2022: £231,000). 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 its customers goes beyond digital advertising solutions – we also offer tools and training to our customers to support them to run their businesses more efficiently. Rightmove Plus is included free of charge as part of all Rightmove membership packages and helps customers throughout the property marketing lifecycle. The Best Price Guide is a reporting tool within Rightmove Plus, which helps agents to gather comparable properties to support their suggested property price, saving them time.
Opportunity Manager is a lead management tool available in our Optimiser package, powered by an algorithm that is constantly learning and improving to intelligently spot the home hunters who are most likely to turn into potential sellers in an agent’s area.
The Certificate for Estate and Lettings Agents Level 3 (CELA) continues to be rolled out to our customers, free of charge. As at the end of 2023, 3,071 customers had enrolled and £1.2m of free training had been delivered by Rightmove.
Rightmove also offers training, advice and free webinars to customers through the Rightmove Hub.