Youwe as a Great Place to Work

For one more consecutive year, Youwe has been awarded the Great Place to Work Certificate. And we couldn’t be more proud!

The Great Place to Work certification process utilizes the trust index, measuring employee opinion and satisfaction through an extensive survey based on 5 core pillars. Credibility is focused on communication competencies and integrity in the company. The core pillar of Respect is all about caring about your colleagues, collaborating and feeling supported in the company. Fairness is about equity and impartiality. Pride is about corporate image and how the work we do is perceived, but also about progress within our teams and the personal sense of pride in the work delivered. Finally, Camaraderie is all about hospitality and how welcome one feels within the company, but it’s also about team dynamics and team intimacy. Our results: 79% of Youwe employees say that Youwe is a great place to work, all these aspects taken into account! 

And not surprisingly, we score the highest on the criteria of Camaraderie 89% and Fairness 81%.

One of our employees has shared during the certification process: “I really like the work culture and the people in the company - they all have the same mindset and it’s often fun to hang around after work. That is rare in my opinion. Also, I enjoy the approachability of our management and the flat organizational structure.”

When asked what makes Youwe unique, another employee summarized it as: “The people. From CEO down to graduate interns, the people make Youwe. We work hard, but also we make the time to enjoy ourselves together outside of work. Cookery club, Friday games and beers all contribute to this. Through difficult times the people step up to show love for each other and go above and beyond to make things easier where they can.”

Youwe offices awarded the Great Place to Work Certificate

Stephanie ten Brink, HR Business Partner at Youwe and the one leading the certification project in the company shares: “The project started not only from a collective desire to learn how we can improve our company for our employees, but also stemmed from a personal passion. Namely, back in the days when our Groningen office was much smaller than it is now, I started conducting an amateurish employee satisfaction survey as I wanted to learn more on what motivates my colleagues and how they perceive the company. From here, we decided to bring this to a whole new level and chose to partner with Great Place to Work organization. The first year of certification was overwhelming as it was a new process for all of us, but from there, we followed an upward trend with our results improving with every year of certification we went through.”

This year’s numbers speak for themselves – our employees agree on the following:

• >96% receive fair treatment regardless of their sexual orientation, ethnicity and/or religion, gender, age.
• 94% feel welcome and at home in the company.
• >91% can be themselves in the company and colleagues care about each other.
• 90% training and development opportunities are offered in the company.
• 87% Youwe is a fun place to work at.

But being a Great Place to Work is not only about taking pride in the good results, it is also about continuous improvement and learning each year how to become an even greater place of work. Stephanie continues to explain: “Every year, we look at the things that we are doing well, to make sure that we continue with the best practices and to really make use of our strengths and celebrate our success. What we are excelling at is the work-life balance, the results are even better than last year and we are scoring much higher than the industry benchmark.”

Janine Nothlichs, Youwe Director of Marketing, testifies: “Youwe is always very flexible in terms of the work-life balance of its employees. We always pay a lot of attention that people can balance their personal life, their interests, family and so on, with their work. And I think it’s a little bit of a story of giving and taking – if as an employee you show motivation and demonstrate your professional effort, you will get a lot of flexibility from Youwe. Instead of treating this strictly as a 9 to 5 job, I think it matters much more what you do and how you do it and how you interact with your team. Communication is really important.”

Stephanie continues: “More importantly, we carefully look into the lower-scoring statements and choose these as our focal improvement point in that year. For example, over the years we have significantly improved our communication and transparency company-wide, and we have invested significantly into providing our employees with extensive learning and development opportunities. Concerning learning and development opportunities, our score is 10% higher than the industry benchmark.”

To the question of what makes Youwe special, an employee from our Groningen office commented this year: “The way we can develop ourselves (various initiatives to reach the lead role in the team, offering of a wide variety of courses, Youwe expedition) and how important personal and professional development is. Youwe doesn’t just say we can do it, but actually helps us to do it, for example by making the time for our development, by paying for exams and by checking in with us on our development goals and progress.”

Next step in this year’s Great Place to Work journey? Defining the focus area for this year’s improvement together with the representatives from all our international offices. “As Youwe has grown a lot in the past couple of years, we are naturally suffering the growing pains. This year, we are focusing on unifying the way of working across our international offices.” Stephanie concludes. One of the employees from our newly acquired office states: “For the Shrewsbury team, the overall process of integrating has been a positive one. There is still so much more to come for the Shrewsbury team as we better align with our wider Youwe colleagues.”

The journey of improvement never ends and we will keep striving to make our company an even greater place to work! Join us, we can achieve success together!