How does our team feel about culture, appreciation, career opportunities, or equity? Where are we succeeding and where do we still have improvements to do? One of the ways how we are finding this out is by taking part in the Great Place To Work survey yearly. Luckily again in December 2023, we were certified as a Great Place To Work™! Let’s take a look at why we earned the certificates and what are our focus points for year 2024 as we are obviously not perfect – nor ever will be!
First, what's this Great Place To Work™ survey all about? Well, it's a global benchmark that helps companies like us better understand our workplace culture and employee happiness. It shows us where we shine and where we can do even better.
“As a data-driven company, this survey data is valuable because it is conducted by an external partner. This is one of the ways we collect information about our development points and of course, see how we compare to other companies”, Head of People Jessica Lång says.
In 2023, it was the first time we took this survey in both locations of Fiksuruoka–Foodello: in Finland and the Netherlands. As the results came in, we were curious to know if there was any difference between the locations. Interestingly, our international team shared quite a unified perspective on multiple things – with some location-specific twists about office facilities for example.
Facts about the survey:
“My first thoughts about the results were that wow, we are doing things well considering how big leaps we have taken in the past few years. Our team’s headcount has grown from 34 to 57 people in two years, we have created new processes and put focus on how to get our team to thrive the best ”, Jessica says. “However, we, of course, have things we need to take a further look at, like fairness in compensation and equity – as in how balanced treatment our team members get in terms of intangible and tangible rewards”, she adds.
💚 Here are some of our top results from 2023:
For 2023 we had two focus points under development: 1) create a better customer experience that affects our corporate image and 2) focus on fairness in compensation and rewarding. Let’s dig deeper into these!
Why is this actually so important when it comes to employee experience?
“We want our employees to feel pride and understand why we exist as a company. How are we making our customers’ lives better? The customer experience of course affects our employees' daily lives as they are aiming to serve the customers as good a possible”, Jessica explains.
“We want our employees to feel pride and understand why we exist as a company.”
One of the concrete actions how we managed to improve this result was “Our customers would rate the service we deliver as excellent” by increasing it by 21 % totaling to 92 %. This came from multiple small sources but one example was that we changed our warehouse partner in Finland.“Our professionals interact with the warehouse a lot and it is also a crucial part of the customer experience so this was a good change”, Jessica says.
In 2023 we took a closer look at our salaries as a whole and made a salary review with our management team. “As our goal is to pay the market average to each role, we gathered data in-house and used that to estimate how we compare to the market averages. Of course, we have also gathered important data points from our recruitments during the past years. We also evaluated the possibilities to buy external data for specific roles, but at least for now didn’t do that”, Jessica explains.
“We all are hungry for recognition and public kudos for the successes in everyday work.”
In addition, we introduced a rewarding and recognition plan to our team. “We want our team members would be able to give recognition to each other for their good work. The recognition activities are very humble and small in practice, but it’s more about the idea behind it – we all are hungry for recognition and public kudos for the successes in everyday work”, Jessica says.
In addition, we renewed the targets for our bonus program with our team. Our bonus program is built on the idea that we want to reward everyone, if we reach our common targets. At the moment our bonus program has five different levels and depending on how the whole team reaches the targets, everyone gets a percentage bonus based on their salary.
“We realized that targets in the bonus program were not reasonable. We reviewed them together with relevant teams and brought them to a more reasonable level. With this, we hope that they feel more realistic and motivating to the team. We continue to do this work during 2024 also together”, Jessica says.
Today, the overall compensation contains monthly salary, bonus program, and local employee benefits, like lunch benefits or travel allowance.
👉Want to know more? Read more about 2022 results here.
Even though we are over the moon by the fact we got certificates to both locations, we are not stopping there! As we are growing, there is always room for improvement. Here are our focus points for 2024:
Even though we made improvements in 2023 to the bonus program and established a reward and recognition plan, there is still a lot of work to be done.
“In the results, we again saw that there was a decrease in whether people feel that they are paid fairly for the job they do and if they feel they receive a fair share of the profits we make. This is something that was our focus in 2023 and we will continue to focus on this even more in 2024. We need to take steps towards better awareness and transparency with these topics”, Jessica says.
As mentioned in the beginning, our team luckily feels that they do feel treated equally in terms of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
“Every team member’s work counts and we want to figure out how to make this even clearer to everyone. Our goal is that people would feel more pride in their work and see the difference they are able to make with their actions”, Jessica says.
As we went through the results together with the whole team, one wise team member pointed out that ‘maybe this is natural for the growth phase where we are as a company’. Our team has grown in two years from 34 to 57 which naturally means that your concrete actions are not so visible to the whole company in a big team. But they are still as meaningful, if not even more, when it comes to contributing to the team’s common goals!
So, how to proceed with this?
“We will start with crystallizing how each individual's work contributes to the team OKRs and therefore to team strategy and overall company goals and strategy. There is a lot of room for improvement in putting into concrete actions and seeing what kind of impact each has”, Jessica says.
👉Read more about how we are setting goals that help our team to succeed.
“At Helsinki, we got our new office at the end of 2022. Now it is time to look at new options in Amsterdam”, Jessica says. We are starting this by putting our heads together with the team. Is the location good? How much on average do people work at the office versus at home? Is the office location somehow affecting this? Could it be better? What things are the necessities at the office?
“The bottom line in all the focus points is that we want our team to feel heard, seen and appreciated, so that we are a great place to work also in the future”, Jessica sums.