About Firefish

Jem maintains a strong day-to-day connection with the entire team, and works hard as a founder owner CEO to remain approachable and involved in both client relationships and development of the team. His passionate and distinctive style includes a number of key elements:- He personally chairs monthly company meetings attended by everyone in the business. The aim of the session is to highlight great work, announce promotions to the rest of the company, champion their achievements and reputation in the industry, as well as giving each area of the business a platform to talk about current activities. He personally celebrates individual successes, encouraging company-wide emails that praise individuals and enthusiastically adding his own praise to every single one. He remains regularly involved in day-to-day work for their clients, giving many people on the team an opportunity to work alongside him and gain from his 20+ year experience in the industry. He also has regular informal gatherings over tea & cake with people from across the business who don’t get the opportunity to work directly with him.  Firefish have a relatively flat company structure bringing him close to individual team members, and he remains actively involved in recruitment for specific departments and across levels. He meets all new employees as part of our induction process, and contributes to many annual appraisals across the business

Firefish' value set is completely driven by the people they are, they are not nice ideas that make them sound like an interesting and caring place to work, they are how they meet the world every day. So, to some degree, everything that they do shows their commitment to the values, however they do recognize the importance of making this commitment explicit... Specifically, they used the values as one component for the leadership team's annual reviews. 360 feedback was gathered from across the business, and part of the feedback captured each degree to which each board member lived each of the values. So, for each value the individuals were given a score on a five-point scale ranging from "they never demonstrate this value" to "they always demonstrate this value", and then examples were given to illustrate the score. This provided informative feedback on where each member of the leadership team needed to increase their efforts to be seen as living a value, and also highlighted who could be seen as a 'standard-bearer' in each value. In addition, they refer back to values in meetings of all descriptions - from company-wide to individual groups - and use them as a guide or moral-compass when making decisions. If managers with in the business are unsure about how to progress with certain issues, they often ask "what do their values suggest you should do".

Firefish have an annual company team-building event, known as Fireflung. This year's event took place on Osea Island, a former wartime base just off the coast of Essex, which is connected to land by a causeway that disappears as the tide comes in. In the build-up they kept the location secret and created a huge amount of intrigue by giving the event a wartime / 1940's theme. On arrival they spent the morning firstly delivering an update on their progress since the last Fireflung, and then results from the staff survey. Firefish then worked together as a group on a couple of key issues for the business - maintaining growth in their client list and creating more time for people to focus on their primary tasks. This process included splitting out into smaller groups defined by different levels of the business, ensuring that ideas from more junior members of the team were given as much 'airtime' as those of more senior colleagues. Following lunch, they then ran a team-building game where 8 teams competed against each other to defuse bombs hidden all over the island! This involved much running around, pedaling down country lanes on bone-shaker bikes, a few gin and tonics and an almighty bundle to grab the last 'bomb'. The evening was then a 1940's themed dinner and party. Firefish all revelled under the stars and by campfires till the small hours and then those with most stamina kept going until dawn in one of the various cottages.