Careers, People

Aiming for Company and People Growth

Lara Waycot, Head of People, talks about how VERB rewards its employees and how this has set up VERB for future success. 

What did the pandemic teach you about your team?  The pandemic taught us lessons, big and small. It taught us that our people are dynamic and resilient. And it shone a light on the efforts they would put in, to support their team and the business as a whole. In honor of this we already offered competitive benefits, benchmarked our salaries and have an EMI scheme in the pipeline. Yet we wanted something more to reward those who make our growth as a business happen, and do it in line with our values. 

“When you succeed, we succeed; and vice versa.” 

We knew that our success as a company was inextricably linked to the success of our people. We wanted to create a framework that helped to optimise our teams performance, all whilst rewarding them for their efforts in our business growth. 

A progression framework for our teams success

And so we created GROW. GROW is a five part framework including; meaningful one to ones, annual salary reviews, quarterly reviews and bonuses, promotion and commission. 

Some of these aspects were not new but this framework provided the mental scaffolding for people to understand how they grow at VERB. 

One to ones became more meaningful with meeting prompts to support good conversations. The team member chooses the type of conversation (i.e. wellbeing, general, career… ) and all we ask is that this time does not become a status update on projects. It’s your time. 

Each month, every team member gives and receives a piece of feedback to someone else in the business. We see feedback as an opportunity to better understand our strengths and development areas so we can continually get better, rather than waiting for 360 feedback at the end of the year.  

The one to ones along with the regular feedback prepare our team for their quarterly review. This is our teams opportunity to share their feedback on VERB (because we have room to develop too!) and review performance in line with their clients happiness, their client KPIs, their stretch goals and living in line with our values. 

The idea is that this deep dive, on a quarterly basis, enables the level of awareness that empowers our team to continuously optimise their performance. 

Driving client success and a thriving business

Ensuring our teams growth and development is a no brainer to us. As a service business, our clients KPIs and happiness is a fundamental part of this. Without happy clients with performing accounts, there wouldn’t be much left of VERB and there most definitely wouldn’t be the number of opportunities we want to provide. 

For this reason, client work is a large part of the quarterly review.  We look at how happy our clients are, how our communication is working and the big question; what are the results looking like.  It is our dedication to delivering a premium experience that sets us apart and so this is our opportunity to recognise our team for making it happen. These reviews focus on achieving our individual potential and at the same time, enabling and empowering our clients to achieve and surpass theirs.

So what does reward look like at VERB? 

If the business has achieved their targets for the year, we give everyone a salary review of 3% in June. Why? We wanted to take away the awkwardness and confusion our team were feeling about having the ‘salary’ conversation. This way, everyone knows what to expect and can benefit from our collaborative effort to grow VERB.

Bonuses are also paid out every quarter. We work out our bonuses based on how the company has performed, how your team has performed and how you individually performed. You can receive up to 12% over the year in bonuses and we wanted this to be a sum of not just your individual efforts, but with a wider vision to encourage you to bring the wider team up with you.

Ultimately, our message is; if we grow, you grow. VERB’s growth means more opportunities and real recognition for making it happen. We’re excited about our future and understand that we all have a role to play in building our legacy.