About Gradwell

The company have generated significant opportunities for career progression within the business due to it’s growth, and have focused on ensuring that colleagues have the right roles in the right places. This has meant transfers from Customer Support to Sales, Operations to Engineering and generic admin roles have developed into skilled roles in Accounting and Product Development. The best example is their internal training for their new internet telephone technology. The skills they require are not typically taught via the formal education system, so they have an in-house trainer and their employment strategy is to find people with the right attitude and teach them the technical skills that they need.

The largest driver behind ensuring they gather effective feedback from across the company is having the senior management team, particularly the managing director, working in an open plan office with the rest of the company so they can pick up on what is going on and can probe/ask questions to identify ideas and turn them into actions. This open plan environment also encourages employees to directly approach the senior management teams with queries, questions and feedback. However, they have also identified some formal, effective ways of gathering information the best of which has been the use of Entropy Scores from tools created by the Barrett Values Centre. Through a survey of all members of staff they can understand the degree of dysfunction in the organization and the boundaries within the company that are the greatest cause. This information has enabled the company to have real conversations within the business and ultimately reduce overall entropy.

The company know that there is no substitute for a 'thank you' in recognition for a job well done. This is an immediate and powerful response and they encourage everyone to recognise team members and managers alike in this way. In addition, they run an employee recognition programme, where colleagues are empowered to say thank you to those who have helped them the most, by giving a recognition card. This card comes in two parts, so that immediate thanks can be given, but also, it goes in the pot for recognition at a quarterly award ceremony. Over the time they have run this initiative, staff have received a mixture of financial and non-financial benefits. The company think that having a thank you card, which tears in two, is a unique twist – reinforcing the thanks in the moment, but also allowing more formal recognition.