“What’s it like to work at Woven?”
As the People Director working at Woven you might think that should be an easy question for me to answer – it wasn’t – my initial response was “well it depends”.
On what you ask. The analogy for me is being asked what is it like to live in London – well it depends on what part. London is often described as a collection of villages – Fulham, Greenwich, Battersea, Chelsea etc – and people are passionate about the village they live in but proud to be a Londoner. We want Woven to be like that – people being passionate about what they do and proud to be working at Woven.
So if Woven is like a city what are our villages? Let me take you on a virtual journey and you can decide what it might be like to work here.
Here is a team surrounded by every type of pressure washer you can imagine (yellow ones) taking calls, emails and responding to social media comments from customers – how do you connect that brush that polishes the car? Next up a team surrounded by shop manikins displaying all those different dress suits for that wedding or maybe even that gala dinner at some posh hotel – they are taking calls helping customers with their suit hire.
Across the way – calls are coming in from employees of companies to record their absence due to illness (one of our clients works in the Occupational health arena). It is night-time now – calls are coming in to the team acting for a major London property owner – the boiler/lift is broken – I am locked out of my flat. Help is on its way!
Another team working at Woven – calls coming in from people of a certain age with medical conditions wanting travel insurance cover. One is an 83 year old from Glasgow travelling with his diabetic wife for a weeks holiday to the Isle of Wight – 15 minutes later he has all the cover they need in place.
Now there is a very boisterous team making outbound sales call for a major utility to people who have indicated an interest in switching providers – full of energy(!) and excitement. We also have a highly energetic team signing up trades people on behalf of an online platform where you can find plumbers, electricians and everything you need to get a job done.
Another team works on behalf of a major high street brand – there is one of the team writing in Mandarin to a customer (I have no idea what was being discussed) on a social media platform – we are preparing for Christmas already. Christmas does come early in the retail world.
We have teams who also work for businesses in the villages, it could be the car dealerships, building societies or an insurance broker, they work hard to create sales leads or handle all types of queries.
Woven is about “People Powered by Technology” and there are two sides to this:
- A team working on Technical or Product innovation – we can already deliver services that no other BPO can and this innovation continues at pace
- A team running our Internal technical environment to ensure we operate as effectively and efficiently as we can across all our sites
Sales; Marketing and Key Account Management work on building awareness and understanding of Woven in the market place – winning new business – supporting existing clients and building our Brand out there
Supporting these teams are
- the people team who recruit, train and develop our people as we build Woven and support individuals at all levels to perform at their best
- the facilities team busily making all our offices great places to work
- the finance teams keeping our own books in order and ensuring we bill all our customers correctly
- the compliance and legal team – making sure we comply with all the regulatory requirements and that our contracts with clients are good ones
All these teams working at Woven are like the villages of London – we want everyone in Woven to be passionate about the village they are in and proud to be part of Woven.
To mix my metaphors “Woven wasn’t built in a day” – so it is a journey but one with determination and clarity about the destination.
I’ll leave you to decide what it might be like to work in Woven but hopefully I have given you an insight
One final thought occurs to me – Cyril Molitor is our CEO living in London – I am not sure he sees himself as a candidate for mayor?!