Maintaining our status as a Great Place to Work: Tackling the tough stuff

It’s one thing to achieve something once, it’s another to be able to maintain it consistently over time. That’s why we’re chuffed to have re-certified as a Great Place To Work UK and make it on to the UK’s Best Workplaces™ list for a second year. Maintaining workplace culture isn’t about luck or ad hoc effort, it’s about continual improvement, ongoing commitment and tacking the tough stuff.

And tackling the tough stuff is exactly what we’ve been trying to do in the last year. We took our lowest scoring areas and met them head on. As you’d expect, they’re not areas you can simply throw money at and hope for the best. They’re tricky areas that many businesses struggle, with so I’m sharing what we tackled and how.

Moving the dial on personal growth

There’s no doubt we’d taken our focus off this area during the pandemic, but training opportunities had been picked up again, the team felt this wasn’t where they wanted it to be. Development and personal growth is a personal feeling, it’s that moment when you reflect on your year and think ‘look how far I’ve come’, that sense of pride when you accomplish something like a new skill for the first time, or that high you get when you’ve pushed yourself into the stretch zone and realised you could do something that you previously felt was way beyond your skills or ability.

The challenge is that encouraging and enabling this kind of personal growth doesn’t come from just providing Lunch & Learns or investing in external training. While that is great, and plays a part, we found it was more than this. It was about better understanding people’s personal goals and connecting their development to achieving them.

We worked with our team to develop a single, simple personal goal; we called it their ‘One thing’. We worked with them to identify ways they could achieve this goal and we communicated their goals with colleagues so that everyone could get involved in supporting them. We created quarterly objectives, provided protected time for development, and proactively identified opportunities that would help individuals grow towards their goal.

All of this has given renewed purpose to our training and development and has moved the dial on personal growth.

Overcoming favouritism

I’m one of three siblings, so I know first-hand how it can feel when things aren’t fair. But I also have three children, so know how difficult it is to provide true fairness when needs and circumstances are so different. In a workplace this can be magnified. Feeling that someone else has been promoted quicker than you, or that a colleague is never held to account for mistakes when you’re pulled up on yours, is a horrible feeling.

The challenge with tackling fairness in the workplace is it’s far reaching and coming from a range of interactions, from not feeling you can speak out when you see disparity to not feeling like you belong. Or even feeling like the ‘system’ works against you.

We started tackling it head on. Knowing that pay and promotion is a sensitive area when it comes to fairness we reviewed our pay bands, developed a series of frameworks for each one, and reviewed every member of the team to ensure everyone was being paid fairly based on their performance and role responsibilities. We provided personal frameworks to every individual. We coached Line Managers on how to encourage and discuss performance and personal development growth with individuals so that they were empowered and understood how to move up in their pay band. This might not feel like it was tackling favouritism specifically but we felt it was a root cause of perceptions and we wanted a fair, transparent system that everyone felt they could get behind.

We also worked on increasing psychological safety. Again, it’s a tough area and there’s no bell that rings when you achieve it. It’s an ongoing commitment to providing safe opportunities for people to speak up demonstrating the positive impact of honesty by avoiding blame.

And finally with a system that’s fair and transparent, combined with the ability to safely speak up, we could lean in on individual needs. Flipping the concept of ‘soft landings’ or not holding individuals to account, into providing reasonable adjustments and accommodations to help people thrive at work, helped make the way we lead different individuals more transparent and makes sense of what might have previously simply felt unfair. Fairness is not always about treating everyone the same. Instead, it's about fostering an environment that supports individuals with differing personalities, backgrounds, and neurocognitive abilities to thrive.

Increasing inclusion

Linked to favouritism is fostering a sense of belonging and creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can feel safe to choose to bring their whole true selves to work. Like favouritism, this is not a one-off effort that once done you can tick the box, it’s a consistent, committed journey over time.

Having taken the team on an extensive DEI awareness journey over the last few years, we ran an all-team workshop on microaggressions. In this session we got personal and unravelled the microaggressions they’d been subjected to in life and at Something Big. From friendly jokes (banter) about baldness and northern accents, to comments about not having children. The session really helped everyone understand the unintended comments that cut deep. We collated these and we now share them with new joiners so they can understand the topics and comments that are unacceptable in our workplace, whilst also asking them what microaggressions they’ve felt subject to. Eradicating this unintended but hurtful dialogue goes along way to improving inclusion.

We also created personal profiles for each of our team that includes a bit about us, what we’re passionate about, and tips for working with us as individuals. These are accessible for everyone to see at all times, and are a brilliant way to understand each other better and celebrate our differences.

And finally, to increase peer-to-peer support, we’ve set up employee support groups for both LGBTQ+ and Neurodiversity. These are informal employee networks where colleagues can discuss challenges in the workplace, support each other and collectively speak out to Leadership if something needs changing across the organisation.

Creating meaningful work

The final area we worked on was giving purpose to the work we do. The pandemic is now famous for giving everyone a reminder on how important it is to live our lives with more purpose. At Something Big we were already on a journey of meaningful change as we became a B Corp, shifted to employee-ownership, and started to step up to our responsibility in tackling the climate crisis, so it felt only right that we brought our team with us on this journey to make a meaningful difference. You can check out what making a meaningful difference means to our team here.

We’re looking forward to seeing the results of our Great Place to Work® Trust Index© Survey, so that we can continue to tackle the improvements needed. In the meantime, if you’re not already using the Great Place to Work® framework I thought I’d give it a little shameless plug (and no I don’t get paid for that, I’m just a happy customer!).

Here’s a few reasons I love it:

1. The questions on the survey are really well written, they’re not vague, you’re not left looking at your results wondering what the context of a score is, or how your team could have interpreted them.
2. The user experience throughout is intuitive, from setting up the survey as an employer to completing the survey as an employee, it just works.
3. There’s a nice blend of raw data with some free text boxes that give the survey depth and sentiment, whilst not burdening employees with having to write loads.
4. Being external makes the survey more independent and confidential so this is always well received and trusted by our team.
5. From an employer point of view, the platform provides great benchmarks and insights that are well laid out, easy to navigate and very quickly help you see what to focus on next.

I’m proud of the work we have done to make Something Big a great place to work. If you too are on a journey of fostering a positive workplace culture, then I’d love to hear from you.