The Danes have a word – Arbejdsglæde (“argh-bites-glurrr”) – which translates approximately as work gladness. Being happy at work.
It runs deep into the fabric of their society and in part explains why they are consistently “there or thereabouts” in the World Happiness Report, published annually by the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
So how do you achieve arbejdsglæde? It’s something we’ve been thinking long and hard about. Indeed, part of my reason for going “back to the floor” in the latter half of last year was to see what it’s really like to work here. To find out what makes our staff tick and, in the worse cases, be ticked off.
We’ve already made some operational changes designed to make it easier and simpler for our sales staff and engineers to do their jobs. Now I want to introduce some further benefits, to demonstrate that we really do value each and every one of our staff.
First of all, we want people to love their job but we also have the time to enjoy a life outside of work. From now on, all our staff will be entitled to 25 days holiday per year, plus bank holidays. Everyone will also get their birthday off each year and if you’re getting married, you can have an extra week off to make sure everything goes to plan on your big day.
The admin side of the process will be easier to handle too – we’ve invested in a new HR system called Bamboo, which will make planning time off much quicker and simpler.
We have also invested in re-vamping the café area, installing a state-of-the-art Coffee machine to ensure quality coffee on tap for everyone.
If you work here already, we hope these changes will show you how much we continue to value your great service to the business. If you’re not yet part of the Concorde family and fancy sampling a bit of good old fashioned Yorkshire arbejdsglæde, you can search our latest vacancies here.
