PEOPLE
Which people do we mean here? On the whole we mean FSquared people. The people that we spend close to one quarter of our year with. The people that we sit next to and opposite. The people we laugh and at times argue with. At FSquared we believe your job should not be a painful experience. Yes admittedly if you asked even an F2 employee “would you keep working if you won the lottery” they would indeed say “er, No.” but if you ask them “do you like where you work”, hopefully, on most days, they would indeed say “Yes”.
At FSquared we continuously re assess our working environment, our communications methods, our working practices and our playtime practices. Although KPIs are a hard thing to measure when it comes to people’s happiness and stress levels we do as much as we can and we keep looking for ways to do more.
In early 2007 we were re-awarded the Investors in People accreditation and in 2 years time we will be looking to gain an Exceeded/Exceptional mark in this. In 2008 we will be looking at obtaining the Work Life Balance accreditation, closely linked to Investors in People, this model helps to ensure a greater harmony between what team members do at work and away from it and can also offer more flexible business hours to clients when needed.
We have held the Quality Management awards of ISO9001 and ISO14001 for 2 years now. Covering working processes and environmental practices respectively, these awards take continuous analysis and, although they sound terribly dull, have assisted us in keeping a real track on how well our systems work and whether we really practice what we preach. We were assessed again in November 2007 and passed with the comments: “extensive analysis carried out on all areas required” and “Excellent systems in place. Refreshing to see a company with total commitment to the environment with excellent records to prove it.”
ISO9001 is a great record for the amount of training & development team members have undertaken. In 2007/2008 56% of people went on training sessions applicable to their growth, role and interest including one person gaining affiliation of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment – after a rather gruelling exam at that! Our aim for 2008/2009 is 100%. On top of external training, we continuously push staff internally to better themselves, to increase their knowledge base and to strive for more than an average answer. We keep a track of this by quarterly One to Ones with our MD, bi-monthly Communications meeting for the whole team and, just started, we have monthly Quality Lunches. Quality Lunches are fast becoming a hotbed of creativity, shared learning and knowledge munching!
We find a big part of not feeling ground down in the greyness of a Monday morning is the physical environment we are in. Steering away from deck chairs and tricycles in the office – much to the dismay of our Office Manager – we find that our open plan style, with plants, music and couches gives us an atmosphere we can feel at ease in. This feeling of light and space, along with the absence of silence, which can itself be very imposing, means creativity is much freer flowing and our team members don’t feel stifled by the rigidity of a box cubicle or stupefied by the constant hum of the IT world that now envelops all offices. At the end of 2007 we shook up the office seating arrangement once again and re-assessed the plants and flora – a rolling stone…
Looking forwards we try to accommodate as many work placement and work experience students as we can uphold. Being a fairly small team this is only usually 2 per year but we’re still pretty proud of this number. We take on post-graduates only, on a voluntary basis, one student at a time and for anywhere between 2 and 6 months. We will be looking to continue this into 2008.
Snack Support is something that has grown with FSquared since the very beginning. At first it was name brand cola and chocolate galore. As the years have gone on we have noticed that this provision was not an aid to a healthy work life. At the beginning of 2007 high sugar and “diet” drinks were banned and replaced with smoothies and fruit juice; chocolate was replaced with cereal bars, crackers and rice cakes and the bottled water order was increased. 6 months into this and we have re-assessed again. By listening to the team we have realised that we cannot force people to eat healthily – and we all need a sugar boost sometimes! We are now combining both options so there is fruit, cereal bars and juice alongside cola, chocolate snacks and ginger biscuits – but only the MD is allowed to eat those. Our team works hard and sometimes long hours so we choose to support them while they’re doing it.
Health and Safety is a fairly minimal worry in an office but we still have a full Risk Assessment, a Fire Emergency Plan and a Health and Safety info page, all available via our intranet.
We’ve given a lot of thought to what we want to say about equality, about diversity, about inclusion. Not because we don’t know what we think, but because we don’t want to be glib, to use empty words and phrases, to make promises we can’t keep.
Like most companies, we have an equal opportunity policy, taken seriously by all of us, managed by our MD…. But we know policy and procedures aren’t enough. We know it all needs to be brought to life by our actions – where and how we recruit, for example – by our commitment – how hard we’re prepared to work to accommodate differences in our everyday practices – and by our attitude and culture – how we respect and welcome the differences between us.
We haven’t got it perfect yet. We can always keep improving. We plan to keep trying and we intend to keep being honest and inviting honesty from others.
