Avado is incredibly excited to have received the ‘Best Culture in a Crisis’ award at the Business Culture Awards.

We were finalists across three categories: Culture in a Crisis (>500 employees), Working Environments & Practices, and Consultancy of the Year. With commendations from the judges for our submission that drew on agility, communication and a diversity of inputs, we won the Business Culture in a Crisis Award!

As Avado navigated through the pandemic and tough business challenges, we relied heavily on our values. From making sure that our people were set up as comfortably as possible to encouraging mindfulness and Yoga, we also focused on providing as much transparency as possible with weekly live updates from our Executive teams. We used weekly surveys as a way to understand how our employees were feeling and coping through sudden changes in their working environment. Ensuring that we were open and transparent as possible, all actions that we took were as a direct result of our people’s feedback, insight and suggestions. So much so, that our people’s experience and engagement by the end of the first lockdown surpassed pre-pandemic levels and maintained throughout 2020.

Beyond the employee experience, we believe our culture also helped us to quickly explore ways to positively impact the wider communities. In keeping with that, we built a new social impact product, called FastFutures. FastFutures is an employer-sponsored digital skills development programme for people aged 18 to 24 from disadvantaged backgrounds. We worked quickly with some of our existing clients, including BT, Public Health England and AstraZeneca, to finance and build a free product. This product would allow individuals to learn and get meaningful exposure to corporate work life to improve their employability. By the end of 2020, we saw 2,000 young people graduate from this programme, and by the end of 2021, we will see over 4,000 graduate. Many of those graduates have already or will have secured gainful employment at a time when this particular portion of society was at significant risk of long-term unemployment.

As recognised by the Business Culture Awards, Avado is making great strides towards creating an amazing culture for people to feel safe, cared for and supported to contribute. The pandemic was an incredibly challenging time, but because of our culture and the wonderful people who contribute to it openly and authentically, Avado was not only able to survive, but thrive and make a positive social impact as well. But don’t just take it from us. Here’s what some of our people said when asked to share an example of a decision made that truly reflected Avado’s values:

“The full and open nature of the lockdown updates from the Exec team.”

“When the directors send absolutely amazing emails to thank the teams for the amazing work they have done. Making us feel like we are the value.”

“Decisions taken in light of the pandemic which have no doubt impacted us, like every other business, but one that has maintained our values across the organisation so our core deliverables remain unaffected.”

A massive thank you goes to the entire team at Avado for making it such an open, honest and great place to work.