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9 minute read | April 15, 2021

Why being a great place to work happens by design, not by accident

Written By: Jane Mason

 

Our number one strategic business goal is to be a great place to work for each and every one of our employees. Our Company values are at the core of this, as is being open and listening to feedback about how we can improve the employee experience. In February 2021, we ran our first bi-annual Employee Engagement Survey to give our people the opportunity to feedback on how we’re doing, especially after the past year. The employee survey ran across a mix of teams and core functions including Product, Engineering, Commercial and Marketing. 

Happily, we saw substantial year-on-year improvement across the majority of scores, with a whopping 99% feeling supported by their manager. This improvement demonstrates how our continued training, education and support efforts, combined with regular internal communications, has helped our managers and people through what can only be described as the most challenging of times. 

Covid-19 accelerated our work to evolve VIOOH or as we call it ‘Future VIOOH’, built on 4 key pillars including Your Health, Your Wealth, Your Happiness and Your Growth. We knew worklife changes created by the pandemic meant we needed to adapt our management approach, so over the past 12 months, we have implemented new training for our line managers to ensure they recognise the importance of mental wellbeing, not only for themselves, but for their team members too. Alongside this training, we also launched our new and improved HR system, CharlieHR, which provides clarity and guidance on setting quarterly personal objectives, aligned to our company objectives. Our survey shows this is working well, with 93% stating they are clear on what they have to deliver in their role and 93% receiving regular, clear and actionable feedback. 

Being a business in high growth mode, there are of course things we can improve on, with cross-team communications being one example. So we’re building out action plans to focus on those scores that could be even better. Activities like our Monthly All Hands company meetings are a regular diary date, to explain how each team contributes to our business goals and objectives. We take care to outline the key metrics for success at these meetings - and explain how we’re benchmarking against them. By sharing the company goals, our employees understand the importance of their role and what they as individuals bring to the business. This is brilliantly reflected in our survey results, with 97% of our people stating they understand how their role contributes to VIOOH’s objectives and 96% say they are clear on VIOOH’s mission and vision. 

The growth of our employees has been a major focus over the past year. We’ve introduced new HR systems which provide triggers to remind our people to ensure they have time set aside for their personal growth. In-line with our growth values, we introduced Udemy, an on-line learning platform, giving learning and development access to all of our people. This helps them find the right tools to grow both in their career and personal lives. This is important to us and is working well so far, with 88% stating they have the right tools and training to do their job well and 87% say they are gaining skills and experience to grow their career. Even though we’ve had to adapt to a ‘new normal’, we don’t want personal and professional development to be neglected. 

Working from home during a pandemic has pushed our teams to find new ways of interacting with each other in a virtual environment. Aside from all of the usual business updates, we also share our weekly wins and challenges. The importance of downtime and having fun with our co-workers is also key to life at VIOOH. But how do we organise fun, virtually? 

It’s been a challenge - but with the help of our VIOOH Culture Club we’ve delivered some brilliant and interactive events. The Culture Club committee involves a mix of people from across different teams from marketing to engineering, HR and product. They set up a temporary working from home newsletter in the early stages of lockdown, which included non-work related updates and activities to keep our employees busy and healthy at home. This was transferred over to Slack when the company widely adopted the communications tool. The team also held virtual events from pop-up painting and bingo nights, to virtual Christmas fun, and activities around cultural events such as Chinese New Year. 

By supplying visibility from a business perspective and combining non-work related social activities, our people felt more engaged and connected than ever. It also helped us to deliver on our number one company objective to make VIOOH a great place to work - and 91% of our people have said that all things considered, it is a great place to work - so we’re definitely doing something right! 

We’ve also continued to drive our positive company culture by launching VIOOH’s Diversity and Inclusion committee, helping to celebrate the diversity in our company, but also to enable a forum that can challenge and enable continuous improvement if necessary. From new hires and across longer term careers, at VIOOH we want to encourage equality and equal opportunities in all areas of business, especially around unconscious bias. 

Introducing new learning and development tools, with the support of line managers, has meant we’ve provided employees with solid tools to both deliver their work to a good standard and grow throughout their careers. Taking deliberate care during the pandemic to communicate regularly and ensure they felt supported has been positively received, and in my view, enabled us to grow and succeed as a business. We provided clarity on our intent to move to a remote-first hybrid working environment, and I really believe this helped signal the trust and transparency needed through the difficult times we’ve all faced. With 90% of our people stating they are proud to work at VIOOH and 88% feel they are making a meaningful impact, the results really do speak for themselves.

Of course we know there are, and always will be, things to improve. We’re building out our plans and will always remain open to feedback. After all, you’re only as good as your last survey!   

We have a number of open roles at VIOOH - if you’d like to join our team and be part of disrupting the digital out of home industry - please get in touch via the Careers page here

Also check out our recent blog about how we approach Hybrid Working here

Jane Mason is Chief People Officer at VIOOH. For more information visit: www.viooh.com


All Team Photo - Sports Day

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