We were thrilled last month when the AFR let us know that Restive had ranked in the top 10 technology companies (we placed ninth) in their AFR BOSS 2024 Best Places to Work. We were recognised out of hundreds of entries in our first year entering the awards and in our sixth year of business. So, as we build our employer brand, we’re sharing some insights on how we’ve made Restive a best place to work and what sets us apart from other employers in our industry.
Overcoming our challenges
Like any business, we had some challenges to overcome to ensure that our people program stacked up to our vision.
The key challenges for our business were:
- We let our people choose how they work, whether it’s in the office, hybrid or remote. But remote and hybrid working can make it difficult to assess team wellbeing;
- Ambitious deadlines and complex projects can increase the risk of employee burnout;
- We are a project-driven company, so it can be hard to schedule company or team wellbeing activities due to conflicting team calendars.
To overcome these we developed new strategies for assessing our remote employees’ mental health, our wellbeing initiatives are now flexible so our people can make them work into their schedule, we leverage tech for communication and our supportive culture around mental health and wellbeing is a known and visibly supported priority across the company.
With our challenges addressed, here are the top three ways we’re becoming an employer of choice.
CommunityConnect
To be direct about it, working in tech consulting can leave minimal time for career development. Our team is focussed on critical client projects that are deadline-driven, so learning and networking can be deprioritised to meet targets and deliver. We’re really proud of our commitment to delivering best-in-class outcomes for our clients, but it’s our priority to provide a framework for our people so that we can do great work and develop professionally. Reporting showed that our team’s engagement with training and development was low and this meant our consultants were not developing in the areas they aspired to on their development plans.
We used this data to review our training and development policies, our approach to onboarding, and to develop feedback mechanisms to measure improvement.
The result was CommunityConnect, our bespoke people development program that provides access to career development opportunities and facilitates connections with industry experts to build community. Our goal with CommunityConnect is to provide our people with proactive, flexible career development and scaffold it so that learning and networking will be easily integrated into their everyday work.
Since implementing our CommunityConnect initiative, 42% of our team has been promoted. Our client feedback has also improved, up from an average of 4.2 to 4.6 (in just one quarter). Our clients’ willingness to give us feedback has also spiked, from a very low 2% up to a huge 71%. This is huge for us because client feedback enables us to identify gaps so we can better service them and deliver better outcomes. Plus, our team engagement has increased significantly across the board – we are seeing higher engagement in events, activities and community discussions.
Buddy mentoring
We see mentoring as an integral aspect of our team culture, professional development and the well-being of our people. So, as part of our onboarding process, every person on our team is matched with a buddy mentor. Both the mentor and the mentee have KPIs around catch-ups, learning and development and goals so that these relationships are supportive, productive and accountable.
We know from team feedback that Restive’s buddy mentoring program is one of the top reasons many of our people love where they work. For new employees, their buddy helps them get to know their new workplace and fosters introductions with new team members, so our people feel at home faster than they have in previous workplaces. We also know that mentoring provides support through tricky projects or busy time periods when some employees may feel siloed. And our mentoring facilitates professional development, so our people are always learning and continually sharing what they know.
In addition, we support our consultants with project delivery mentoring. If someone needs to learn a new way of working or technology that is unfamiliar to them, we provide support and knowledge gained from other projects so that they can up-skill. Experienced team members will mentor or provide training, ensuring that all our people have the resources and support they need to succeed and learn.
Bespoke recruitment process
Our bespoke talent and recruitment process is one of the critical aspects that sets us apart from other employers in the industry and we’ve relied on it since day one to identify and recruit the best talent in our industry. We use AI to remove bias from our recruitment ads and interview questions, we standardise some aspects of the process and we utilise a layered approach to interviews so that making an offer to a candidate is a team decision, but it also makes this decision-making process fair and diverse.
We know that our approach to recruitment is a critical reason why we have been able to build the ecosystem of tech experts when we first launched Restive. We are now a 400+ team and growing. We know that our people love where they work and our clients love working with us because we anticipate issues before they happen, we create solutions that hadn’t been considered and our team is fun and easy to work with.
There’s not enough space in this article to cover everything we are implementing to make Restive a great place to work. Our open approach to company performance and financials, to mental health and wellbeing trainings, to lunch-and-learns and internal networking events fosters a community and an ‘always-on’ approach to learning. Our employee offering is multi-layered and it will continue to evolve as we grow as well.
Since our launch in 2018, we have been commitment to revolutionising the tech consulting industry. We are proud of the strides we’ve made and believe that our approach to people and culture is key to helping us achieve that goal.
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