We Invest In People – Gold Accreditation, with Denise Emsden, our Vice-President of People and Organizational Development

Sphere Fluidics recently received the Investors in People Gold Accreditation. Can you tell us more about this award and what it means for the Company? 

I recognized early on that we needed an external benchmark and two years ago, we started working towards Investors in People gold accreditation. There were a number of factors that we needed to demonstrate to have achieved this. I’m super proud that we did so and some of the things that really meant the most were around the area of communication and consultation. Our team typically feels that they are consulted and that they can input into the company strategy. We aim to be as inclusive as we possibly can, and to have this endorsed by the team is great! 

Learning and development is another key one for us and we’ve put a lot of effort into it. From the moment you join the company, you have your HR and health and safety inductions, but it doesn’t stop there. We have a 12-week onboarding plan, which moves from mandatory training for both soft and technical skills. We’ve had a lot of feedback from employees who’ve said they feel like they’ve been able to hit the ground running and contribute far quicker than if they’d just been left to figure it out by themselves

For other learning and development opportunities, we typically have a three-pronged approach. Everybody gets an hour lunch and learn, for example, in conflict resolution. We then have a two-hour deeper dive, followed by a half day for all people managers, and we try and replicate that through many different topics. One of the great things that people have shared is that they find these opportunities really helpful, not just for their professional life but actually for their personal lives as well.

Achieving Investors in People gold accreditation has been lovely to accomplish, but our journey doesn’t stop there, the assessment program highlighted more opportunities for improvement, so we keep going in order to provide the best employee experience for our team and ongoing opportunities for development. 

The world of work has changed considerably in recent years, how does Sphere Fluidics’ approach reflect the ‘modern workplace’ mentality? 

From day one, one of the things that we sought to do (where possible) was leverage hybrid working and we have a specific policy for this. This guidance avoids any ambiguity, and we explicitly share our hybrid working policy with anybody who comes for an interview. We have found that above all else, the modern job seeker wants flexibility in terms of their working pattern.  

Hybrid working has been key, but we have to be really clear about who we can / can’t offer it to. Where we can’t offer hybrid working, we do offer alternatives such as one day a week working from home for project work, and we’re explicit about trying to help support that. 

Physical and mental health and wellbeing are also incredibly important to the modern workplace. We sought a private medical insurance provider who could meet the needs created by the gaps in the NHS and on a very regular basis we highlight these benefits to our teams e.g. the ability to offer all employees a virtual doctor’s appointment within 24 hours is a massive plus point.  

We’ve leveraged a lot of mental health support by running some mental health awareness training sessions, which are well supported by our team. We also offer extra holiday, but I still believe that flexibility is more important above anything else and is the biggest item that we can offer today. 

Our three employee resource groups are very important to us. These include a social committee, an Equality, Diversity & Inclusion group, and a mental health and wellbeing group and these groups develop and lead initiatives for the benefit of the whole organization. 

We also get a lot of comments about our new facilities and just how stunning they are. We were fortunate to be involved in the design of our environment and help drive innovation through having the best surroundings in order to do our best and most innovative work.  

Can you tell us a bit about the Company’s involvement in supporting the local community in Cambridge? 

 As a company, we’re keen to support charitable causes throughout the year, for example Jimmy’s homeless shelter in Cambridge. This includes food bank collections and winter coat collections. We also try to participate in the many things that the owners at Granta Park support, to be part of the bubble of the research park, such as attending the recent Granta Power Games and coming second overall! 

We support a lot of work experience students; this year alone we have seven work experience students. Through this we try to support as many of the local schools and communities as we possibly can. We also have a keen interest in STEM events and have attended the University of Cambridge graduate careers fairs. We also had a stand at the recent Mills & Reeve Cambridge Wide Open day to share what we do with the local community. 

How is Sphere Fluidics committed to environmental initiatives? 

This is an area we are continually monitoring to identify areas in which we can minimize our environmental impact.  

To build our new bespoke facilities, we repurposed an existing building rather than building from scratch and we used local suppliers for every project, where feasible. This included local electric vehicle and bicycle delivery company Zedify for shipments in Cambridge. All these efforts have limited our carbon impact. Our company logos on display in our new office are constructed of moss and we have made heavy use of indoor plants and biophilic design throughout to enhance employee wellbeing. 

Aside from this, we have strong initiatives around recycling. We now recycle a wide range of plastics from our laboratories and one of the largest volumes comes from the recycling of pipette tip boxes. Tip boxes are usually manufactured from high quality virgin polymer, and once granulated, are suitable for re-use in a wide range of applications. These plastics are typically re-used in double glazing packers, plastic wood and garden furniture. Our third-party partner reprocesses 200 tons of tip boxes per year that would otherwise have gone to landfill. 

To learn more about Investors in People, please visit www.investorsinpeople.com.