For six years in a row, consulting company Sopra Steria has been named Norway's best workplace in the 500+ employee category by Great Place to Work. Through its studies of companies that perform well in this ranking, Great Place to Work concludes that there are three basic conditions that create a good workplace: that you are proud of the work you do, that you enjoy your colleagues and that you trust the management. Sopra Steria works towards these goals, where "the power of sharing" and a culture of sharing and leadership is central throughout the organization. Hilde Solberg Holm, Consulting Director at Sopra Steria, explains how.
By Marte Semb Aasmundsen
Pride
Celebrating and highlighting what we achieve makes people proud. That's why ringing the bell and marking major contract wins is an important ritual. Equally important for creating pride is the keen use of internal social media. This is where projects, praise from customers, praise from colleagues and external presentations are shared. Managers play an important role in making people proud by highlighting employees, visiting projects, showing interest and giving feedback. External visibility is equally important for creating pride, so employees who write blogs, professional articles, give lectures or otherwise become visible in the media or in professional arenas are encouraged and rewarded.
Well-being
Enjoying working with colleagues is the second dimension of creating a good workplace. As a consultancy organization, most of the company's employees work on projects at customers' premises. This gives us extra challenges in creating a "home" in our premises where they can meet and thrive with their colleagues. We have therefore established a number of different meeting places for our employees at our premises, so that employees can meet each other, get to know each other and create networks. Every day of the year, there is some kind of social or professional activity for our employees in the afternoon at our premises. Often there are professional gatherings organized by our more than 80 internal professional groups, people gather for yoga, build robots or play board games. In addition, there are a number of physical activity groups such as football, golf, climbing, etc. What all these activities have in common is that they are designed to help people enjoy working with colleagues, share expertise, network and create a sense of belonging to the company. Managers play an important role in this by facilitating all the activities, showing interest and participating themselves.
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Trust
Employee trust in management is also not something that can be adopted, but something that is built through behavior and communication. We see leadership as a collective process carried out by a set of different people in different roles. It is not only line managers who perform leadership. We have given up the search for "the perfect leader". We did not find the "recipe". However, we learned that all personality types, from the most introverted to the most extroverted, from the analytical to the driven, can fulfill the leadership role in a good way by using their strengths and having a development perspective by striving to become the best version of themselves. That's why we focus on building balanced leadership teams instead of looking for the perfect leader. A leadership team made up of different personalities creates trust that different perspectives are taken into account and that everyone finds role models they can mirror themselves in.
