JourneyHR turned 14 years old last year year. We started out as a lifestyle business, raising our young and growing families and enjoying the flexibility until we realised just how much untapped commercial potential we had…. And that’s when we hired our first person.
We are now a team of 24 people and we could not be prouder of our team and the people who have joined us on our journey. Building a great team takes a lot of hard work but we’ve always believed in strong communication and collaboration as the fundamental building blocks on which we’ve grown. We keep our team connected with our commercial progress and make sure that we find time to spend together to connect, share ideas and have fun.
From our first hire back in 2011 to our latest hire in 2024 we’ve always been very clear about our recruitment process. Hiring great talent who understand our vision and feel a connection to our purpose has been critical to our success. We developed JourneyHR Values as the team started to grow so we had a clear, consistent and fair framework that set out our expectations around behaviour at work. We believe these behaviours are just as important as the technical aspects of the role. They have allowed us to share meaningful feedback with each other, spot areas for us to develop and have helped us to hire and promote people at the right time.
Growing a high performing team also requires hiring a diverse group of people. Diversity for us is wide ranging within the team and includes visible and non-visible factors. Our intention has always been for our team to feel like they can be themselves at work so creating a culture where psychological safety is strong has always been something we’ve put a lot of focus into. We don’t always get it right and we seek feedback regularly to make sure we are continually improving and learning. Seeking feedback is done through 1:1 check ins, weekly forums, review meetings, mentoring sessions, our annual engagement survey and wellbeing survey etc.
We’ve also always been firm believers in understanding our individual preferences at work and have always included a robust personality questionnaire into our selection process. We also ask people to complete a task in our selection process to really understand how they process information, solve problems and build relationships. All of these are critical skills regardless of level of experience.
Recognition holds a special place in our culture. We celebrate the achievements, big and small, that contribute to our collective success. By acknowledging the efforts and accomplishments of our team members, we create an environment that radiates positivity and fuels their motivation to excel. Recognition not only uplifts individuals, but it also cultivates a culture of appreciation where everyone feels seen and valued for their contributions. An example of how we do this: every week everyone can shout out other team members if they have done something extra or helpful to another. We share these shout outs in our Friday end of the week round up comms and on a quarterly basis we celebrate people with the most shout outs.
One of the biggest learnings over the past 14 years is making space for everyone to contribute and share their ideas to help the team grow and develop. Whilst we all have different levels of experience within our team, great ideas can come from anyone.
One of our biggest challenges at JourneyHR has been finding the time to do everything we’d like to do. We are an ambitious bunch of people who are keen to do brilliant and impactful work. We have a strong ‘people focused’ preference in our team (no surprise there) so at times we have been challenged when it comes to boundary setting and taking on too much to please others. We recently spent some quality time together as a team and we talked about how our individual preferences impacted us as a collective. We created four simple commitments to help us be more effective when working with our clients and each other:
· Data drives us forward
· Think different, think big
· Support others and protect boundaries
· Empowering bold moves.
Each of these commitments were broken down into actionable behaviours we can all put into practice every day.
The power of a team lies not only in its collective intelligence but also in the synergy created by collaboration and mutual support. Together we have achieved far more than we could alone.
At JourneyHR we are experts in helping to shape and sustain high performing teams. We run workshops regularly with our clients to strengthen collaboration and ways of working. If you’d like to hear more about how we do this then please get in touch…