Celebrations today at Ensono Digital as we’ve been recognised as one of the UK’s Best Workplaces™ for the third time!  

Being ranked 13th in the medium business category really is a win for our whole team. Every single person here contributes to making Ensono Digital a fantastic place to work and we all play a role creating a culture where we enjoy doing the work of our lives. Congratulations to Ryan, Tulchan, The Sovini Group and Hilton who won top spots in the small, medium, large and super large categories respectively.

Being ranked this year is particularly meaningful for us. Lockdown brought obvious challenges for every organisation, and ensuring that our people and clients continued to feel connected to our culture was something that we worked hard to achieve.  

So, here are three of the things we’ve done over the last year that help to make Ensono Digital a pretty special place to work:

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Mental Health and Wellbeing initiative

We’re proud to have a team of wellbeing advocates, comprised of people from across the business, who help the rest of us balance work, life and wellbeing. Over the last year, this has included rolling out mental health first aider training, providing parents with resources and guidance to help them and their families during lockdown, running regular wellbeing ‘pulse’ surveys to help us improve and better support our team’s wellbeing, and sending surprise gifts to the team to keep our spirits up. We received industry recognition as a centre for Excellence in Wellbeing last year, and the team’s continued focus on this area is something that benefits every single one of us at Ensono Digital.  

Prioritising our culture as we transitioned to 100% remote working during the pandemic

This could be a whole blog post on its own! We already had a remote working policy at Ensono Digital before lockdown, but going 100% remote was new to us. We wanted to make sure our people could still experience our culture and values wherever they were working. Our fantastic TechOps team quickly tooled us all up with new technologies, like Lucidchart and Lucidspark, to help us communicate and collaborate with clients and each other. New ways of remote hiring and onboarding were designed, and we introduced a virtual buddy system to help new starters find their feet and feel more connected to the wider team. We set up new Slack channels to help recreate the buzz in the office, with dedicated photo competitions, a channel for parents to share ideas (and find solace!) and a channel dedicated to all things remote working. We set up virtual coffee drop in meetings to replicate the morning chats we’d usually have in the kitchen, ran regular quiz sessions, team meetings and a introduced a whole plethora of other ways for us to still feel in it together and part of the team.

Reshaping our values

Last year, Ensono Digital turned 10 years old and we decided it was time to revisit and reshape our values. The reason we did this is that we’d grown as an organisation and the values that we had when we started out hadn’t all grown with us. Some of them, we realised, were more behaviours than values (pragmatism) and some applied to our consultants, but didn’t really apply to our operations team (technology agnostic). While in full lockdown, we launched virtual focus groups with our people and our clients, to learn more about what they value. We asked them to tell us stories about what it’s like working at and with Ensono Digital. By asking for and listening to the stories from our team and our clients, some clear themes emerged. Themes like being in it together – with our clients and each other, the fact that we enjoy our work and take pride in delivering quality and that we’re a driven, curious bunch focused on improving our own skills and our clients’ businesses. With the help of our team and our clients, we defined a stronger set of values that better represented who we are and the value we deliver to the people that we work with.

We’re still learning how to make Ensono Digital an even better place to work, and all the new activity over the last year adds to the initiatives and great benefits we already have in place. We’d love to hear more from other companies trying out new ways to engage their teams and create more progressive cultures. If you’ve got stories to share, would like to learn more about what we’ve been up to or want to join the team, then get in touch.

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