Rolls Royce staff order 1,659 bicycles

Rolls-Royce (RR) employees have ordered 1,659 bike packages at an average of £700 each, through a cycle-to-work scheme. This equates to £1.16 million worth of bicycles and cycle-related equipment.

Richard Grigsby director of Cyclescheme, which runs the Rolls Royce scheme, said: “After a year of planning we were looking forward to a successful scheme delivering 500 bikes. When we had 141 on the first day we knew this would be a special scheme and so it turned out. We trebled our usual participation and were thrilled to help deliver smoothly and efficiently the biggest bike scheme the UK has ever seen.”

Employees at the global power systems business could select a bike package between 25 May and 19 June. Cyclescheme produced 6,000 leaflets and 1,000 posters to help publicise the scheme to the 21,000 UK staff.

Rolls Royce placed information on intranet sites and sent out global emails to advise employees of the scheme. Cyclescheme also liaised with local partner bike shops to organise road shows to enable Rolls Royce employees to see a range of equipment.

These bike packages were delivered by 228 independent cycle shops from across the UK such as Samways Cycles (Derby), Specialised Concept Store, (Bristol), Dales Cycles, (Glasgow) and Leisure Lakes (Nottingham). Samways Cycles turned over £148k worth of bikes to Rolls Royce employees.

Samways store manager Andy Baines comments; “In the current economic climate this has helped our business. As we only had a two month window to supply all these bikes to the participating Rolls Royce employees. This made us extremely busy at this time. It was a very successful scheme for us.”

Cyclescheme also runs cycle-to-work schemes for Asda, Glaxo Smithkline Microsoft, Coca-Cola, IBM, Centrica, and Barclays.

More articles on voluntary benefits