Expense Management
Employee Benefits
Pim Kiffen
On an insightful night out in Amsterdam, Pim Kiffen, Country Manager Netherlands, was joined by Romy van der Geer, Talent Partner at Personio, and Laura Vreeke, Head of People Ops at Studytube. The topic of the evening: how to remain a great place to work when scaling your company. Not to worry if you missed the event, because we are sharing the five key insights from an eventful evening.
Pim KiffenMost companies try to hire for a culture fit, but that’s not always the best practice.
Romy: “It’s really important for us to call it culture add instead of culture fit when it comes to hiring. Culture fit doesn’t sound very inclusive. It also sounds like you need to fit in exactly to be able to be successful, whereas culture add means you understand the values and the way of working but your background and your experience is as diverse as possible. That means you can add to what we already know and bring a diverse perspective.”
When it comes to the approach to compensation and benefits, it’s time to understand that everybody is different.
Pim: “We tend to stick with these one-size-fits-all benefits, giving everybody a gym subscription, which is the classic example, and say ‘stay well’. It doesn’t work like that. What I think is really important, and what we at Circula think is important, is to start listening to the diverse needs of each individual, and that we stop using these one-size-fits-none solutions. We want to meet these needs by making benefits flexible, without making things complex for HR and Finance. It is something to get right and something that needs to be leveled up to remain a great place to work.”
Developing your people is crucial for the success of your company. Structuring that process is key.
Lara: “We use a platform. It’s called Studytube and it’s great! But all jokes aside, we weren’t taking care of learning and development that well and I think we improved quite a bit. Now we are making sure that every role has a development path. We use our platform and every employee has a budget to spend on it. We provide recommendations for training and specific skills, and utilise our platform that way. A platform does really help, but you do need a good structure behind it.”
As you grow, your company evolves, and so does your culture.
Romy: “Recently we changed our whole culture up, naturally based on what we are trying to do. I think it is very important to keep asking yourself if what you are doing right now is still helping us to get to where we want to go. It is still in line with what we stand for, but just a bit different to fit what we need now.”
It all starts, and ends, with your employees.
Pim: “We have interviewed over 1,000 employees and over 300 employers in the Netherlands, to ask them what it means to be a great place to work. We are creating a report and it starts with covering the basics of what is important to employees, and goes all the way to what you need to do to become a better employer, or even a great place to work.”
The report will be published soon, but you can already pre-order your copy by .
