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Our people are of the greatest importance to us. We want to ensure that everyone in our Lab Digital team enjoys working with us, so that we can grow together. For this reason we are currently working on an audit of our culture: taking stock of everything we have done and are doing up to now, and looking to the future to see what we can build and improve upon. To help us in this process we are partnering with Great Place To Work.
As a growing company, we are undergoing constant change. Starting from a small and well-organized group, we are creating an organizational structure that is as flat as possible, where everyone has his or her responsibility. As we grow every aspect of the business changes, and this presents both challenges and opportunities.
We are, and we want to remain, a place where our team are happy to work, where everyone can be themselves, but also where they feel they can do their best work in a role that suits them well. We want to be a great place to work for our people.
Recently we have partnered with A Great Place To Work, a company that conducts international audits with a wide range of businesses in order to identify and improve their culture. This process consists of two parts: a “cultural audit” in which the company describes how it sees its culture, and an employee survey in which everyone provides anonymous feedback on their experience of the company’s culture.
The audit requires deep reflection on the reasons we approach various aspects of culture and the processes and practices that give effect to them. The research focuses on nine topics: hiring, inspiring, speaking, listening, thanking, developing, caring, celebrating and sharing. We have learned a lot from taking stock and describing everything we do as a company. We’ve learned that we pay a lot of attention to culture in our internal practices, and these insights provide us with great motivation to take the next steps.
The second step of an employee survey provides a realistic picture of how well our company culture is understood and shared within the organisation, but also with quantitative research on how our culture is experienced every day by our team.
At the end of this process, we will receive a thorough review of our cultural audit and the results of the employee survey, together with advice on the next steps that we need to take to continue to refine and improve our company culture.
The other result that might come from this process is to be certified a “Great Place To Work”. Whilst that would be welcomed, our goal is to build on what we work on every day. For us, building a structure for improving our company culture, having the honest feedback of the team, and the expert advice from Great Place To Work on how to keep improving is the next step forward for us!
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Erik van Zuylen oversees the Lab Digital company culture. He’s addicted to people and business development and fascinated by how people interact and grow within teams.