Building a great working culture remains a challenge for so many businesses. I believe this is mostly because creating culture cannot rely solely on processes. It needs people to truly care about improving the working environment for themselves and their team.
There are a few things we do at Edenred Payment Solutions to create an inclusive workplace, by prioritising the development and engagement of our people:
Internal Collaboration:
When it comes to culture, it's often the small things done by the majority of people that make the biggest difference. For example, our teams all sit together in an open plan office with a hot desking policy, which encourages different team members to mingle and learn from each other. We regularly hold cross-team meetings and encourage contributions to presentations and feedback from all levels of the business, ensuring that voices from all levels of seniority and experience are heard.
We come together more formally to celebrate our wins twice a year at our office, and with programs like ‘IdealDay’ and ‘Edenraid’ we support local communities with volunteering days, and fundraising targets as a team.
Championing Diversity for Better Problem-Solving:
Diverse perspectives offer better problem solving. It avoids groupthink and encourages people to consider ways of working that don't look the same each time.
When it comes to gender diversity in the business, Edenred Payment Solutions actually has a 60/40 split in favour of women, something we’re really proud to maintain in a technology payments company where gender balance can be difficult to achieve.
However, diversity expands much further than just gender, and are making sure the business is as inclusive as possible for everyone. Whether that's via remote working, creating more accessible job specs or publishing salary ranges for our roles in the UK.
Encouraging Creativity, and Project Freedom:
Our overall goal is to create and develop the best possible solutions for our customers, and future customers. We're very open about learning the best ways to achieve this, and experimenting with different activities to get us there.
By fostering this creativity and freedom, we're able to support our team members who have great ideas to build and execute them. We don't run a top-down company where orders are defined by leadership and are expected to be carried out with no questions asked.
A recent example of this would be our product marketing team, who wanted to find a way to better educate our current customers, and new customers on the value of gift cards. Over the last few months, we've worked on this project bringing in various different teams to develop a free to access email series, and we're excited to see the feedback and the results.
While there’s not one-size-fits-all approach to building a good culture, what we have found is that being open to feedback and willing to make changes underpins all of our success in fostering inclusion for Edenred Payment Solutions. While there is always more to do, and more to learn, we’re all invested in that journey and I believe we are a better business because of it.
By Karine Martinez, Head of Sales at Edenred Payment Solutions
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