Samantha Wood over at The Insider blog has visited British Innovation Agency ?What If! Innovation to find out what makes them such a great workplace.

Here are some elements from Sam’s post:

Let’s start at the beginning – the reception area. It IS a reception area in so much as there are welcoming people who’ll point you in the direction of the right meeting, but there’s a bit more to this space than that. It’s an eating area, a kitchen, a place for meetings, a place for parties, an internet café and a space for congregation and recognition.

Recruitment:

“They just want to get involved. Everyone here does. We only hire the kinds of people who are really passionate and pro-active and who believe in our values”.

Even laying people off is done in a deliberate, positive way:

“It took a lot of hard work to plan a way of making redundancies that could be as painless as possible for those involved. But it was totally, totally worth it. These people are our friends, and they remain so – which I hope means we got it right”.

Go read Sam’s entire post – it’ll give you some excellent insight into a very happy and very successful workplace.