Celebrating Best Companies day at Street Group!
I get asked by candidates all the time what I like about working here.
I have to condense my answer, but the core themes I always talk about are transparency, trust and people:
Transparency
I’ve never worked at a business as transparent as this one.
Every Friday at our company All Hands, each team gives business updates on what’s been going on. That could be new clients signed up, new starters joining the team, new features in the product, or business updates from Tom & Heather.
There’s also an anonymous Q&A at the end — anyone can ask Tom & Heather anything. In the past, this has ranged from “How do pay reviews work?” to “What are the background plans for the company? Now that Street has launched it’d be great to hear what your plans/goals are for the next 3/6 months, 1 yr & 5 yr?”. All of the questions get answered, no matter what they are!
Trust
They’ve never said this explicitly, but I get the feeling that Tom & Heather subscribe to the Steve Jobs approach of “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
There’s so much trust, and a huge sense of ownership. Having worked at small, medium and large organisations, this for me is what stands out and makes it feel like a special place to work. To have a sense of ownership of my business area, to be able to suggest and implement changes end to end, is what I’ve been looking for for quite a while.
People
People can make or break a team. Our team ticks all the boxes for me — we’re supportive of each other and believe in each other, but we’ll also challenge each other (kindly) if we think there’s better ways of doing things.
There’s a real sense of “we’re all in this together” — that we all believe in what we’re building and what we’re trying to achieve. It really feels like we’re on a journey together, and to be playing a part of that feels really special.
I know we’ve got a good thing going here—I always say it’s what I’ve been looking for.
There’s a difference though, between knowing something is true in your gut (we’ve got a really special thing going on here) and having proof that you’re right 😂
So you can imagine, I was absolutely over the moon when we made Tempo’s “Top 20 startups to work for in 2021” list at the start of the year. I was even more starry eyed when I found out we’d been awarded 3 star “world class levels of engagement” accreditation from Best Companies last month.
After being awarded 3 stars, we found out that we’d also made not one, not two, but ✨three✨ of the Best Companies lists! This was absolutely huge for us. It’s the first year we’d entered, so we weren’t expecting to come out with anything like this.
We got told there’d be a virtual awards ceremony on Friday 21st May. It might not be an in-person black-tie event, but we’ve all been starved of social interaction this past year, so I immediately booked to go into the office that day.
As luck would have it, our Co-Founders and some of our development team were also in that day, so we put the event on the TV and watched the day unfold together 😊
Obviously I had to get a selfie with our 100 Best Companies award too💅
Making the lists in the first place was a huge achievement for us — on top of all that, we ended up with some incredible results too!
🌟 #41 Best Company to work for in the North West
🌟 #18 Best Tech Company to work for in the UK
🌟 #24 Best Small Company to work for in the UK
Even more importantly, though, is that we got insights like these from our team’s feedback:
As a small company that’s grown by 50% in the last 12 months, knowing that we’re still getting these things right is really comforting. That doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels though. We have to constantly be checking in with the team, ensuring they’re getting the support, trust and empowerment that they want from us — it feels like this is just the beginning!
To find out more about life at Street Group, visit streetgroup.co.uk, our Glassdoor page, or visit our careers site.
