Fostering a Culture of Ownership & Investing in the Employee Experience

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, said management theorist Peter Drucker. And it doesn’t happen on its own. Creating an outstanding employee experience is an ongoing job. In 2019, we doubled the size of our team — growing from 300 to 600 people. We grew in diversity and locations, with more than 38 nationalities represented across our offices. We recruited hundreds of new hires and integrated two acquisitions comprising hugely talented teams.

Our employee Net Promoter Score is currently at a healthy 11 (for scale, an eNPS greater than 10 is good and one greater than 50 is amazing) — this makes us 1) very happy and 2) committed to pull all the stops to keep our team engaged and happy. As we head into a new decade and continue to grow our team, we are staying true to our core values and finding new ways to bring them to life in our employee experience.

Building a culture of transparency and accountability

We’ve worked hard to build visibility and transparency at Contentsquare. Our shared goals are highly visible, and we have regular department and team-wide check-ins to see where we stand, what’s working well and what’s not. All employees set quarterly goals and we trust they are doing their best to meet their objectives and will readily share any hurdles they face. That’s why in 2020 we’ve introduced greater flexibility around the way we work because we care more about results than hours worked, where we work, or how many holidays we take. This led us to rethink our approach to working from home and to implement unlimited vacation days in the US to replicate the success of this model in our Tel Aviv office. 

Investing in personal growth

We believe that if our employees grow, the company will grow. We’re fully committed to investing in the career development of each member of our team. The CS Space Academy portal we launched this year is a one-stop-shop for our employees’ internal training needs. We’re a very international team with increasing opportunities to work from a new country. We have people choosing to transfer to another office every month, and recently we organized ten moves, including UK to France, Tel Aviv to New York, etc. We’re on the cusp of launching a new Learning & Development strategy, and we have big plans afoot to further grow our Peer-to-Peer learning programs, because we believe in our internal expertise, knowledge sharing and co-development. We also started a brand new onboarding program called Rocket Days, where we gather 10 to 20 newbies a month in our Paris office for a few days of training and French immersion! We’ve also kicked off an internal management mentorship track.

Energizing our team and realizing impact

Most of all, we want our team members to be excited about coming to work. About the ambition of our vision and product roadmap. About the impact each team member can have. That’s why we encourage contributions, involvement, ownership and ideas. In fact, our employees truly drive our innovation agenda — every year we host a company-wide Hackathon and the winning projects are included in the company roadmap. We’re very proud of our company culture and of the work our local culture crews do to keep things fun, unexpected and lively. And even though we’ve grown significantly, we still think it’s important for everyone to come together once a year at our annual WorldWide KickOff. This event highlights our commitment to transparency, as it’s the opportunity to align everyone around our strategy and recognize the terrific contributions of all our employees. Think 600 people in the countryside, two hours north of Paris, for three days…

What matters to our employees matters to us

We want to become more socially accountable, and we’re investing in several initiatives to help get us there. We’ve had several employee-led efforts to introduce sustainable practices, including the CS Green tree-planting initiative, which was a winning Hackathon 2019 project and our Culture Crew-led volunteer days. Our customer and prospective customer community expressed an interest in discussing the advancement of women in ecommerce so we’ve created new forums to do just that with more than 100 attendees at our London event last week.

One team = shared success

Everyone on the team is part of the Contentsquare adventure and we recognize that the success of our company relies on each and every one of our employees. That’s why we’ve announced that in 2020, we’ll be giving every full-time employee stock options.

In short, we’ve set ourselves some ambitious goals but we believe the experience of working towards them is just as important as achieving them. We think employee engagement starts with listening to the team, which is why we have regular surveys, daily direct discussions, monthly Let’s Talk employee sessions and, for (the few shy folks) our anonymous online question box. The growth we’ve experienced in the last couple of years has been tremendous and strengthened our organizational culture no end, and we know our best developments are still to come. Stay tuned!