2016 Year in Review: The risual Way

kate-lincoln

Kate Lincoln – Operations Director at risual

This year has been a transformational year for risual, as well as our customers. We have strengthened our capability, scaling with demand to support customers to deliver long term transformation by investing in new technology expertise.

I’m looking forward to 2017, as we will see further growth in all business areas, typified by our next cohort of apprentices graduating into fully fledged employees. Our new technology practices and solutions are set to deliver even more value to customers come the turn of the year, be them existing or new customers.

All growing businesses will understand the challenges faced as we push through stages of growth.  We have expanded our offices and invested heavily in our support to employees to ensure a happy, motivated workforce.. We introduced Mothership Week to reward employees and give back to charities. Here are my highlights of 2017:

 

risual Events:

It’s easy to assume that many of the events we run at our offices in Stafford, Scotland, Microsoft UK or further afield simply ‘just happen’. Our marketing team thrive from organizing and facilitating great experiences for customers and enabling our technical experts to deliver powerful and interesting sessions. This year we have run many successful events across the UK, with of course, headline sponsors of Future Decoded being the standout. Our customers value our in-depth workshops, which can deliver real technical insight on a personal level. Our webcasts are a great example of this and are all available for viewing below:

2016 risual webcasts

Our marketing team once again delivered a fantastic event at Future Decoded, as well as keeping up with our expanding technical capabilities to ensure all customers know and understand everything we can offer.

 

Summits and Mothership Week

risual directors run the company under an ethos of doing the right thing, for our employees, our community and our customers. It is often stated that the feeling of family and belonging is what helps us pull together and go above and beyond in all circumstances. To achieve this, we make a point of proudly giving our employees the opportunity to donate working hours to charity and help those in need. We volunteer ourselves, collectively as an organization, twice a year to take a full day out during the risual Summits and we also take a day out for each employee during Mothership weeks to lend a helping hand. Some members of risual go that little bit further by helping charities of their choice which we allow two additional days per year for

In 2016 we have launched a programme called ‘Mothership week’. This is a week for a small group of employees to get together and focus solely on their wellbeing by having a day in the life of another team. We believe that this helps them to learn more about the company and the other roles that can sometimes go unnoticed. We also use this week to donate another day of working hours to a charitable organisation.

The latest ‘Mothershippers’ have participated in activities such as Zumba, Tae Kwon Do and Pilates. All activities received great feedback and everyone who got stuck in had a great time. The groups have been giving back to places such as House of Bread in Stafford and Spark in Burntwood to help improve their facilities. We also assisted a local community in rejuvenating the special garden at Acorns Children’s Hospice in Walsall, who we’re also planning to revisit again before Christmas.

 

Family Day

Every summer we host a Family Day where all employees are invited to come along and join in on hilarious activities for team building and to meet the families of each of our great employees. We believe that a little bit of competitive fun really does keep our #risualfam together.

This year we treated everyone to some ‘risuale’ which went down quite a treat, along with the ‘It’s a knockout’ competition, street food, children’s entertainment and games. Everyone got involved and really enjoyed the day and to top it off the weather was very kind to us all.

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