Brightec Shortlisted for Best Employer

We’re a team fuelled by continuous improvement, enthusiasm for learning and vast quantities of coffee, pastries and dad jokes. If pressed, we’d say it’s the coffee that keeps us grounded… With brand values such as Collective Responsibility, Lovers of Life and Confidently Humble, we’re super proud and honoured to have been shortlisted for Best Employer. But this blog is pushing us a little outside our comfort zone; sit tight while we try to ‘espresso’ much it means to us.

Brightec creates bespoke mobile apps for brands across multiple industry sectors. We develop close, long-term working relationships with our clients, enabling us to guide them through the constantly evolving technological landscape, transform their conversion rates and improve their brand reputations. We work with some pretty awesome clients, most recently Waterstones and Virgin Red.  They help us prove that creating a place where your employees are happy and fulfilled in their working lives, results in great work which keeps your clients happy – and returning. Above all, we aim to be a great employer.

The passion each of our 17 team members (as of Jan 2022) has for the work they do feeds directly into the success of the work produced, so we dedicate time to keeping that energy within every member of our team.  Part of this means ensuring everyone in the team is well supported. Coaching and Mentoring are the two main ways we do this:

• Coaching Each individual is paired with a coach whom they meet regularly to discuss how things are. This ensures people are known well and supported in their personal and professional development.
• Mentoring Centred around professional growth, we adopted this during Lockdown to create space for Coaching to take on a more holistic approach to wellbeing. Everyone has a mentor whom they meet each week for 15 minutes to discuss improvements in their role and work towards promotions.

With this in mind, we’re so proud that Jonny has been shortlisted in the Rising Star category. Not only is this a huge testament to him, but it reassures us that we’re achieving our goals to support our staff. Great coding is a journey and Jonny keeps up-to-date with iOS best practices, constantly developing his skills with regular practice-coding and making use of different development environments to expand his knowledge.

Each year Brightec coordinates with local schools to provide work experience and industry inspiration to the young people in our community. We’ve also been known to offer desk space to those starting out in the industry, to provide a little camaraderie. This is how Jonny came to be part of the team; after a brief stint using our office as a space of study while doing an iOS Developer course we offered him a chance to learn on the job as a Junior Developer. He impressed us with his ability to seamlessly switch between projects and technologies, and even wrote a great blog about his experience of starting out in a new industry.

Our office was a big part of agency life; breakfast together on a Monday and having lunch playing board games, sharing cookies and bonding. Throughout the pandemic we’ve sought to meet when/where we can for walks and pub lunches/bbqs in the garden so that we can be a support not just to our team, but their wider families. We also developed HappyTrack; a Slack integration which sends a daily message to each of our team, asking them to rate their happiness by clicking a number between 1 & 10. Notifications alert a manager of any significant change in someone’s daily score (compared to their personal average). Having used HappyTrack for 18 months, it has helped us oversee the wellbeing of a remote team and we’ve seen a consistent increase in average happiness scores.

 Although we don’t have an office, we’ve found ways to meet monthly in-person as a whole team and as individuals. Being shortlisted for the UK Dev Awards Best Employer has given us a confidence boost that we’re doing business right. We hope our approach inspires others to make work a place not just for productivity, but also joy and growth.