Building a Great Place to Work, Year After Year

In March 2021, I walked into a tiny, grey office in central Brighton for my final interview in Akkar’s recruitment team. The surroundings may have been less than glamorous, but Callum’s vision for the business was anything but. I bought into it straight away without knowing quite how much the business, and my role within it, would change.

There were very few bells and whistles back then. Pipelines lived on whiteboards, aircon was a distant dream and taking the bins out on Friday afternoon was very much part of our job descriptions.

Five years later, I’m sat here as Akkar’s HR lead, writing about something that would have felt fairly surreal back then.

For the third year running, Akkar has been recognised as one of the UK’s Best Workplaces in Consulting & Professional Services in the Small and Medium category.

This year, we’ve had a standout result with 100% of employees agreeing that Akkar is a great place to work, returning us to the result we achieved in our first year of certification in 2024.

Understanding the other 4%

In our second year of certification in 2025, that figure was 96%.

It was a result most businesses would still be very happy with. But Akkar has always had a high-performance mindset, so instead of celebrating the 96% and moving on, I wanted to understand what the other 4% was telling us.

Much like Formula One, when you’re operating at the front of the grid, small margins make all the difference. We looked at the feedback in depth, talked openly about where we could improve and focused on changes the team would actually benefit from.

The feedback around flexibility was hard to ignore. People wanted more of it, and we knew it was something we needed to look at.

Gradually, we introduced flexible working practices and built the infrastructure and frameworks needed to move towards hybrid working. In classic Akkar fashion, we don’t do things by halves, so that also meant new MacBooks for everyone. Great news for most of the team and a slightly steeper learning curve for some of us who were used to Windows...

Our work-life balance score increased by 25.9%, with flexible working and Summer Fridays coming through strongly, particularly around morale, long commutes and helping people stay with Akkar when circumstances change.

Recognition received 100% positive feedback too. From promotions and lunch clubs to high-rollers trips, incentives and bonuses, it has always been part of how we operate. I’ve enjoyed enough of those rewards myself over five years to be a slightly biased advocate. If you expect a lot from people, their success should feel worth celebrating.

We also saw a 25% increase in perceptions of Akkar as a psychologically and emotionally healthy workplace, a 21% improvement in clarity of expectations and a 24.3% increase in fairness and consistency in management.

High performance and a great workplace

Recruitment is a brilliant industry, but it is also incredibly demanding. Deals fall through, candidates change their minds, clients pause hiring, and targets have an unfortunate habit of remaining targets regardless.

In my view, being a Great Place to Work has never meant removing our commercial edge or lowering expectations. We punch above our weight, hire ambitious people, and want them to perform, progress and be proud of what they achieve.

I feel strongly that high performance and a solid employee experience should support one another. The challenge is making that sustainable, with clear expectations and honest conversations when something isn’t working.

This year’s results gave us something specific to think about. Perceptions that promotions went to those who deserved them had fallen by 9.5%.

Naturally, my mind immediately went to the worst case: were people being overlooked? Had decisions become inconsistent?

But, digging deeper, the issue was different. Our old tick-box progression framework simply no longer reflected how the business operated or the kind of consistent, sustainable performance we wanted to develop.

Six months and many rabbit holes later, this January we introduced a bespoke progression framework to make development and promotion decisions more objective and transparent. People now have greater clarity on what strong performance looks like, what they need to develop and what is required to progress. Managers have a more consistent way to assess it too.

It’s early days, so I won’t claim success before we’ve measured it. But that is exactly the point of the process. Find the 4%, tackle it head-on and see whether the changes actually work.

Earning it year after year

Akkar today looks very different from the company I joined. We’ve grown, broadened our services and continued investing in our people.

But growth also means being more deliberate about culture. When everyone sits within a few metres of each other, culture can happen quite naturally. When colleagues work across different services, cities, countries and time zones, you need to work harder at it.

I’ve learned there isn’t a point where you reach a strong score, congratulate yourself and decide the job is done. The business changes, people develop, and what worked two years ago might not be what we need next.

Being a great place to work isn’t something you achieve once. It’s something you have to earn, year after year.

There will always be another 4% to understand, and that’s what keeps us moving forward.

Abi Wright - abi@akkar.com