We’ve recently undertaken an interesting exercise as a company while developing new pages for our website. It’s become increasingly important to us to have some of our team and their thoughts represented.
While we are now a 49 strong Fire and Security business we started out as a family run concern. As a kitchen table start up, family members helped out to get things done, advice from friends was regularly sought and people who eventually become employees were close contacts of the founding team and so the culture was born.
As the company grew, people joined the team and have stayed, nearly half for over twenty plus years, their skills and roles developing as the business expanded. It’s easy to say that you have a strong culture but one of the overwhelming outputs from our website questionnaire is that the main thing that our people value are the others that they work with.
We feel that building a good company is about being clear and maintaining a set of values that are important. We don’t have a list of these values, although hopefully we could all recite them, but they feature people, support, family and honesty.
Being a great company is not about being perfect, the management team are accountable and approachable and we are always looking to do things differently and make improvements along the way. We pride ourselves on listening to people and there has always been an open-door policy where people can share their views or concerns.
It’s about more than just listening though, we hear what’s being said and then act on things. Developing a strong culture is not just about perks or policies it’s an intangible feeling that people are genuinely happy to come to work, to spend so many hours with their peers and that they get some real meaning from their role.
Our people first attitude extends to our clients too. We’re so proud to have so many long-standing business partners, large and small, across the UK. We operate in a very transparent way and we always seek to build long term relationships so that any problems or discussions are very open and easier to talk through.
We’re very proud of the business that we do, the way we interact with our own team and those of our clients. Our web page is now live so people, who don’t already, or who would like to get to know us, can see the people behind the email addresses. Most of all we’re proud of the fact that the overwhelming response by staff on why they like working for Black Box is the people they’re surrounded by and the support they receive.
And for that we’re very grateful.
