Celebrations all round today as Ensono Digital has been ranked in the UK’s Best Workplaces™ in Tech. The rankings measure employee experience and the culture and environments that organisations provide by surveying employees and auditing each company’s culture, programmes and practices. So we’re incredibly proud that the culture we all play a part in building here at Ensono Digital to enable our team to enjoy delivering the work of their lives has secured our place as one of the very best tech consultancies to work at in the UK

The list celebrates the outstanding and cutting-edge practices that tech companies are implementing to create a great place to work, and in a category that includes both product and consultancy businesses, it’s a huge honour to be the 8th named consultancy in medium category.

Great Place to Work®, who run the scheme, define a great workplace as one where “Employees trust the people they work for, have pride in the work they do and enjoy the people they work with.” Companies in the list are doing exceptionally well across all these dimensions, so we’re incredibly proud that people, purpose and culture focus and attitude to drive continuous improvement continues to be recognised amongst the very best.

Since we were ranked 13th within the broader Best Workplaces category, we’ve continued to listen to our team and learn from others at the forefront of doing great things for their people. Here are a few of the things we’ve introduced in the last six months alone that have helped us retain and build our status as one the UK’s Best Workplaces.

Continuing to support our people in line with career development and progression.

• After 10 years, we launched a bigger, better and more motivating Competency Framework, with the support of our People team, Talent team and our Department leads. The new framework sets out expectations for everyone in the business across their team, as well as personal leadership and commercial areas. It encourages our people to make the best contribution they can, whilst setting out clear accountabilities and enabling better, more meaningful conversations around personal development.
• We have a pretty senior team at Ensono Digital, but as we scale to better support out clients, offering just four levels of progression within the team didn’t feel motivating enough or representative enough of the different skills and experience of our consultants. The competency framework project highlighted the need to introduce a new ‘Lead’ role to better reflect the make up of our team and give people a new space to develop into.
• We launched a Career Progression Plan (also known as CPP) to encourage a roadmap for growth and succession plan to “keep curious, keep improving”. Before, we’d just set our team a series of goals for each quarter, but we know life doesn’t work like that and the structure didn’t support our team’s longer-term development effectively enough. Our new CPP outlines short, medium and long-term goals so we can help our people succeed in their current roles, and achieve their future ambitions.
• We moved to a fluid model for promotions to recognise growth, celebrate and reward success on a regular basis, instead of just twice a year.

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We’ve prioritised our value of ‘in it together’

We’ve prioritised our value of ‘in it together’ as we’ve accelerated national hiring, with 45 new joiners in 2021 so far! 25% of our headcount is ‘regional’, based outside of London and the Home Counties, so we’re doing even more to bring the Ensono Digital culture to remote working.

• We’ve introduced more personalised onboarding to create a more positive experience for new starters, making them feel immediately part of the team and ensure they know we prioritise their wellbeing. In fact, we had a fantastic Wellbeing Week, raising awareness for mental health and kicked off a Summer health and wellbeing allowance for our people to spend on what’s important to them.
• Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) commitments are to increase knowledge and education, grow empathy, and take action. We’ve kicked off a DEI survey to understand more about the diversity within our existing team, find out more about everyone’s individual needs, how we can support them and to learn more about how everyone feels about diversity and inclusion. The data will help us to form our DEI strategy to hold ourselves accountable for increasing that representation within the team. More details to come in an upcoming blog!
• We launched ‘Ensono Digitalversary’ engagement surveys to understand how our people are enjoying their experience 1 year into being an ‘Ensono Digital-ean’. Consistent scores of 86% survey scores, with an average of 90% recommending Ensono Digital as a “great place to work”
• We’ve rolled out options for regional co-working spaces so team members who live outside London and close to each other have an option to collaborate and get together in person, without the commute.

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Saying thank you

• Anyone reading this will have experienced first-hand the ups and downs of the past few months. Multiple lockdowns and uncertainty have knocked the most resilient of us at times. Throughout all this, our brilliant team has pulled together to create connection and community remotely, with their usual good humour, professionalism and mutual support. So, to say thank you and to celebrate the rolling back of restrictions, we gifted everyone an Ensono Digital Freedom Day voucher. The conditions of the voucher were that recipients had to use them to celebrate themselves with family, colleagues or friends and that they had to tell us what they’d been up to and post a picture of the celebrations on Slack. From flying lessons, to boat parties on the Thames and boating on the Norfolk Broads, to dining out, we’re happy to report the vouchers were put to good use.

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A huge congratulations to all the other companies who have ranked out there – it’s been a tough time to maintain and build a Great Workplace, but necessity is the mother of invention and some incredible, innovative employee engagement initiatives have come out of the pandemic. And if you’re interested in finding out more, you can learn all about them in the UK’s Best Workplaces™ in Tech report.