“A Great Place to Work is one where: you trust the people you work for, have pride in what you do, and enjoy the people you work with.” – Robert Levering, Co-Founder of Great Place to Work
For the 7th consecutive year, CluneTech has been recognised as a “Great Place to Work” and as a “Best Workplace for Women”. In addition, we were extremely proud to be recognised as a “Best Workplace in Tech” for the accreditation’s first year.
We originally started our Great Place to Work journey in 2014. However, in 2014 and 2015, we were unsuccessful and thus, were not recognised as a Great Place to Work. After years of working on our culture and ensuring that we truly listened to, and acted on, our employee’s feedback, we were finally recognised as a Great Place to Work in 2016.
Over the years, our headcount has continued to grow and in 2020, we made the jump into the large category. Since then, we have continued to climb the rankings and have also been honoured to be recognised as both a Best Workplace for Women and a Best Workplace in Tech. As we celebrate our 7th year being recognised and a 20th place ranking, we want to take a look at 7 of the main reasons why CluneTech is a Great Place to Work.
Our Great Place to Work accreditation can be largely attributed to our incredible #OneTeam culture that fosters collaboration, innovation, and entrepreneurship. In a world that is constantly evolving, our teams work together to proactively adapt our models and processes to meet client and market needs.
At the core of this #OneTeam culture is of course our amazing people. We employ over 1,500 employees in 20 countries, all of whom passionately work together towards one common goal – making business better. At CluneTech, we are unique in that we have six CEOs across the Group, all of whom live by our values, inspire innovation, set a phenomenal example, and most importantly, trust and empower our teams to drive CluneTech forward.
Work-life balance is hugely important to us and we aspire to make CluneTech a company where the people closest to us would want to work. We all have a unique challenge in integrating our work and personal lives and in acknowledging that, we want to encourage flexibility to ensure our employees can achieve an optimum work-life fit.
As part of this commitment, we have implemented our very first permanent Flexible Working Policy which saw the introduction of a number of flexible work opportunities for staff, and indicated to all that remote and flexible working are here to stay. These opportunities include; hybrid working, remote working, flexi-time, part-time roles, job sharing, IVF and pregnancy support leave, and much more! We also recently increased the annual leave allowance for our Bulgarian teams from 20 to 22 days.
Our internal communications strategy is based on 3 core pillars: Connect. Collaborate. Engage. These three pillars guide our activities, ensuring that all communication and engagement initiatives are aligned with our #OneTeam mantra and culture.
Connect – Firstly, we aim to connect with our employees in a meaningful way. It is of paramount importance that our people feel involved in our communications and are given a reason to continuously check our internal communications platform, Workvivo. Since moving to remote working in 2020, we have gone to great lengths to ensure that everyone stays connected while working apart. We run a jam-packed calendar of virtual events, run countless competitions, host virtual spaces where people with similar interests can come together and communicate, and much more.
Collaborate - As part of our internal communications strategy, we craft initiatives that inspire active involvement and collaboration between our teams. An example of this is our Zoom-In Thought Leadership Sessions - a peer learning initiative where anyone in the organisation can volunteer to run a 45 Minute training session globally for their colleagues via Zoom.
Engage - The final, and arguably the most important, pillar of our internal communications strategy is Engage. By engaging our employees, our aim is to bring our #OneTeam culture to life and ensure that our workplace is one that our employees love to be a part of. This is done through various means of celebrating, recognising and thanking our people for continuously going above and beyond.
Our internal communications strategy has been massively aided by the introduction of our very own in-house studio in our Kilkenny HQ. With an abundance of equipment including a green screen, ring lights and a state of the art sound system, the studio also offers live-streaming capabilities that have revolutionised the way in which we communicate with our people. Implemented and run by our Head of Design, Tom Watts, the studio is used for everything from company updates to external conferences. The studio has become a crucial element of our internal communications strategy, enabling us to communicate in a way that wasn’t possible before.
At CluneTech, we want to ensure that our employees are given every possible opportunity to have their voice heard. After all, we have a fantastic history of employee feedback and ideas that have led to the implementation of hugely beneficial initiatives for the Group. Last year we felt that the lack of a more frequent, formalized outlet for employees to submit feedback was hindering our ability to harness their ideas and use them to better our work environment. Thus, the decision was made to introduce our Quarterly Pulse Survey, which goes live on Workvivo at the beginning of each quarter. The Pulse Survey enables us to pulse check employee engagement and satisfaction, while facilitating open and honest feedback through an anonymous channel.
This is just one of the many ways our people can submit feedback. Other available channels include our Anonymous Feedback Survey, the Great Place to Work Trust Index Survey©, and our global Great Place to Work focus groups.
CluneTech Cares, our CSR programme, is a great representation of what we are – a team of truly caring individuals, giving their best to support and add value, not only to our customers and our teammates, but also to the communities in which we live and operate! CluneTech recognises that participating in these sort of activities contributes not only to the development of communities, but also enriches the lives and promotes the wellbeing of our people. Hence why we introduced a Volunteer Day to our employee benefits in 2021.
CluneTech Cares is an award-winning programme, picking up the award for ‘Best Use of CSR’ at the 2021 HR Management & Leadership Awards'. In 2021, we supported 34 different causes across the world. These included the Irish Cancer Society, Karin Dom, Race for the Cure, A Very Special Place Inc, MS Ireland, Jack & Jill, E-ducare and many more.
It is safe to say that our organisation would not have improved as much as it has culturally without our magnificent Great Place to Work Team.
And last but not least, is our commitment to continuous improvement. Similar to our products and services, when it comes to our culture and benefits, we regularly ask our people “what can we do better?”. Here’s a brief recap on some of the many initiatives that have been implemented as a direct result of employee feedback through Great Place to Work.
CluneTech has been ranked 20th Best Large Workplace in Ireland. Read the full press release here.
Want to join our team? We’d love to have you on board! Visit our careers page and check out our open positions.