At Culture Shift our vision is a world of work and study that is safe, happy and supportive for everyone, everywhere. We help other organisations to join us on this mission by unlocking the power of anonymous reporting to encourage their people to speak up and shift their culture for the better.
But we wouldn’t be able to do that if we didn’t live our own values. If our workplace culture wasn’t a positive role model for partners we want to work with, and if it didn’t attract new Culture Shifters to join us and strengthen our team.
Recently we’ve achieved a real milestone when it comes to living our values. We have just been officially certified as a Great Place To Work®! This is a very exciting accomplishment and there are certain areas that we are particularly proud of doing really well in, especially because this stems from feedback from every one of our team members. On the other hand, we also believe in constant improvement and growth and in this blog, as well as celebrating the positives, we will talk about what we are committed to improving and how we plan to do that.
What we achieved
When asked whether everyone was made to feel welcome when they join the company and was treated fairly based on age, race and sexual orientation, we scored 100%. This shows that our commitment to diversity, equality, inclusion and belonging is always of utmost importance to us.
We also scored high in questions and statements about the following areas:
- Our company’s honesty and our ethical business practices – we strive to be transparent about everything we do and do what is right
- Responsibility and accountability – everyone feels they are given enough responsibility and knows what is expected of them
- Providing a good work-life balance – we highly encourage everyone to work around their personal lives with good flexibility of when and where they can work. Managers also regularly check in with their team members to make sure their workload is manageable
- Being able to take time off when we need it – we pride ourselves on offering an above standard holiday allowance as well as up to five Wellness Days throughout the year, plus enhanced leave policies for a range of different reasons
What our plans are
Using the data, we have drawn up a plan and goals over the next year that we want to work towards so that next year we improve on our Great Place To Work® score.
This includes:
- Rewarding our people in the best and most innovative ways through pay reviews, benefits schemes and incentives
- Empowering our people – we’ll be launching a new 1:1 structure, which includes clearer goal setting and reviews for each individual
- Finding new ways to grow and develop our team at work by encouraging and facilitating personal development, reviewing our values and celebrating behaviour linked to those, plus undertaking whole team training
- Better communication – building transparency into our processes so all people at all levels of the business are engaged with important decisions and changes
Our values are extremely important to us and through achieving our Great Place To Work® certification and our work with You Can Now (a training and development consultancy we’re working with) we’re looking to build on these and really reward team members who are living and breathing the values. To launch this work we held a session where the entire team participated in conversations and workshop exercises to further understand and define what our values and the associated behaviours are – it was amazing to see so many people in the team be aligned in what we think and already practising our values every day. We work together with an understanding of a common goal and our company’s vision that we each strive to achieve.
We will continue working with YCN on future sessions that include building skills and confidence in giving and receiving positive feedback and goal setting that supports the ongoing growth and development of individuals and the team as a whole.
Next year we will update you on our progress as we put our plan into action – make sure you’re following us on Twitter and Instagram at @ukcultureshift and our company page on LinkedIn here.
