Bold Insight believes responsive design that prioritizes employee experiences helps drive engagement and productivity (and boosts financial performance). That’s why when we began to design Bold Insight’s corporate architecture, we drew from our own broad experiences as employees to build a space that benefits from the freedom and flexibility of a start-up while offering the support and processes of a multinational corporation.
The result is a workplace that focuses on career building and livelihoods and invests in its employees for the long term. In this blog, I’ll offer some tips and tricks for like-minded business leaders and HR professionals who want to design their company around their employees.
Consider how organizational hierarchy can impact culture
From the beginning, Bold Insight has put a premium on the emotions, ideas, and experiences of the people we work with. Of course, this approach helps us dive deep into the research areas that most benefit our clients. But our focus on empathy doesn’t just drive our user experience and human factors research – it’s also the bedrock of our workplace culture.
There are a number of ways Bold Insight promotes this (and we’ll dig into more below). But our first step? Eliminating competition in the workplace by prioritizing people, not titles. Take a look and you’ll see only four titles across our team. This leads to less peer-to-peer competition (for a single director role, for example) and a greater focus on how each employee can contribute to the whole of the company, rather than chasing a promotion.
We first highlight this during the hiring process. We know work-life balance is blurry at best and view interviewing potential coworkers as a time to promote our values – including curiosity, openness, and collaboration – not just to learn about a candidate’s background. A person’s approach to problem-solving and discussion during the interview, for example, is just as important to us as their previous experience.
Once employees join Bold Insight, they work together on small teams that prioritize collaboration. We leverage productivity tools not only for communication and task management but also as spaces for employees to proactively step up and help their coworkers. One of our Slack channels, for instance, enables employees who have light workloads to offer assistance to coworkers working on disparate projects throughout the organization.
By promoting collaboration, we foster a culture that values empathy and teamwork, enabling our employees to thrive. And our flat structure also enables us to react quickly to employee suggestions or requests without red tape.
All of this supports employees being heard, which ultimately is the core of how we deliver value to our clients.
Ongoing training deepens employees’ expertise and value
From the interview process through onboarding and beyond, Bold Insight makes employees’ livelihoods a priority. To do so, we offer ongoing training to make sure our teams have the right skill sets that equip them to do the impactful research our clients need.
Multiple weeks of classroom-style training with an instructor helps new hires at all levels learn how Bold Insight collaborates across teams and with clients, which in turn helps them feel more confident and understand what’s expected of them on the job. We also lean in heavy to a mentorship-style job shadowing. Team members have many opportunities to shadow experienced project leads to understand the nuances that aren’t learned in a conference room.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a candidate with twenty years of experience, or a fresh graduate with no consulting experience; all employees at Bold Insight begin with the same training on day one – and all are offered equitable and regular opportunities to continue leveling up their skills.
This helps our employees stay engaged, remain experts in the field, and step into whatever role is necessary to help their coworkers and our clients. Likewise, it ensures our clients experience the same level of expertise and collaboration no matter who – or when – they work with any Bold Insight team member.
Thoughtful, equitable compensation and benefits incentivize employee loyalty
We want our employees to consider their interview with Bold Insight as the last one they’ll ever have. Without the right incentives, however, we know employees aren’t likely to stick around for the long haul. That’s why, along with our empathy-focused culture and flat organizational structure, we take significant steps to offer thoughtful compensation and benefits.
Our equitable monthly performance bonuses are a great example of how we put this into practice. Each month, we perform a comprehensive analysis of our business goals. Then, if we’ve met those goals, we recognize the achievement by awarding all staff the same cash bonus.
To turn a phrase, we put our money where our work is. All employees, from managing partners to summer interns, matter equally to our company’s success. Our performance-based bonus model reflects this reality – and we believe it’s a significant differentiator for Bold Insight’s collaborative, employee-based workplace. We don’t complete our work in silos, so we don’t silo the compensation earned for the benefits our work offers our clients.
What’s more: along with the opportunities for equitable monthly bonuses, we perform regular company-wide salary assessments to ensure equitable pay across the board. And, based on their hire date, all employees undergo review for annual salary increases once per year.
We’re proud that Bold Insight is a 2023 Inc. Best Workplace
Designing your company around your employees has a real impact. It’s part of why Bold Insight has a 97% employee retention rate.
Word’s getting out, too: Bold Insight was just named a 2023 Inc. Best Workplace. The award reflects how Bold Insight’s employee-centered model stands out among thousands of employers. QuantumWorkplace surveyed the employees of each nominee to review qualities including management effectiveness, comprehensive benefits (including perks, like Bold Insight’s five-year vacation reimbursement), investment in employee growth, and overall company culture.
To chat more about how our inclusive, collaborative, employee-first culture can benefit you, please reach out.