Walking the walk

This week (on Thursday), the Cloud9 People Team will be picking up a Lotus Award.  The Lotus Awards recognise companies with great cultures and employee engagement.  We will be sharing the stage with some big household names and we couldn’t be more delighted to have been recognised in this way, at such an early stage of our journey.

Nick Court, our CEO, set up Cloud9 People in 2015.  We are just over 2 years old.  Starting a business is a unique opportunity to shape a culture from the outset and our culture is very much by design, not by accident.  As Nick explains:

“Even though we are a start-up, we wanted to make sure that our people were at the heart of everything we did.

We took time out to understand our requirements and we have implemented a fab wellbeing offering, employee benefits, recognition and a flexible working environment.”

We have an employee discount programme and a wide-ranging wellbeing scheme which includes physical, psychological and financial elements.  We work flexibly and we have no maximum holiday entitlement.

Even more importantly, our structure is the number 1 driver of engagement for us at this stage in our business.

Recently appointed Head of Consultancy, Karen Teago, described this in action:

“On joining Cloud9 People I saw opportunities for me to lead on initiatives that weren’t already under way.  I’ve been given the freedom to plan and manage projects, and the full support of the Directors from my very first day”.

Ben Keating, Director of People Systems, commented:

“We may not have slides and fake grass (at the moment) but we do have a great people culture that we work at every single day of the year.  We trust our people and we all repay that trust by being there for each other.”

Director of Creative Solutions, Luigi Ho-Tien-Ton, added:

“If we want to be trusted by our clients to deliver great insights, results and employee experience, we have to live it ourselves”

 

If we are going to advise organisations how to get the best from their people, we should be doing that from a position of experience and knowledge.  Not because we read the book, went on the course or got the certificate.  We are not just talking the talk, we are walking the walk.  And it feels great!

 

 

The Lotus Awards take place on 22^nd June 2017 at the Royal Society of Arts.  We’ll be live tweeting from the ceremony https://twitter.com/Cloud9people