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.
I think it’s the same everywhere, it’s the people that are the key, if you are working with awesome people you love to be around you are going to be very happy at work, if not it can only ever be at best just a job.
I agree completely. It really is the people to a very large degree!
I enjoy your posts Alex. But this one has wormed its way into the contrarian in me.
Why wouldn’t (or couldn’t) a company whose business is INNOVATION apply some of its juice to an alternative to the traditional layoff? Seems deeply discordant to me.