We sat down with Denise, our VP of People and Organizational Development to get to know her, what her role entails.
Denise has been part of the team at Sphere Fluidics for the past two years, placing a high priority on establishing the best employee experience and creating opportunities for development. In her free time, Denise loves live music and enjoys going to concerts and music festivals with her friends and family. One of the things she loves about living in Cambridge is the access to a wide range of music events, whether that’s at the Corn Exchange or a short train ride to London.
How long have you been at Sphere Fluidics and what does your role involve at the Company?
I joined Sphere Fluidics in 2022 as the VP People and Organizational Development and Frank, our previous CEO, scoped out this really nice, very attractive role for me. The remit being to take this company, who had just received a substantial amount of funding, from a small, local spin-out biotech to hopefully become a global organization. So, there were a number of key objectives that needed to be met.
First of all, as an employer, we began thinking about our people strategy. An example of something we focused on was creating a compelling and competitive benefits package. So, we set some key objectives, and the scope of my role involved getting the company ready to scale.
Building our brand was really important. Underpinning that was our culture. For example, what do we tell people about who we are and what we stand for? We undertook a big piece of work around our values and behaviors as well as looking at how to attract good talent. We developed great benefits structures, we created a really nice place to work and scoped out great roles. However, we needed to consider how do we actually get people through the door and share that message?
So, for the last two and a bit years we have been trying to achieve all of those core elements, and so much more, to attract and retain the best talent.
How did your academic and professional journey lead to this role and to working at Sphere Fluidics?
I’ve been working in the field of people for almost 25 years! Going way back, I joined the supermarket Sainsbury’s back in the early 90s on their training management scheme and I would say that was really where I earned my stripes from a people perspective. At 23, I was given the opportunity to manage a team of up to 200 people, which was crazy back then, but with the trainee manager hat on, you learn very quickly how to do things right and if you don’t get them right first time, you certainly do by the second, maybe the third.
I spent 17 years at Sainsbury’s, moving into customer service, learning and development and ultimately HR. It was then that I realized I only knew the corporate world and in order to grow further, I needed to go and try something different.
It was more fortune than anything else that led me to my next career opportunity, which was working in elite sports. I moved to a company called Juddmonte, who are a thoroughbred horse racing operation. They had operations in the US, UK, Ireland, and also France. For me, it was the complete polar opposite of what I knew, far from working in corporate, and requiring a completely different skill set to those I had known previously. It was a real baptism of fire, but I loved it, and I spent five years really trying to understand everything about that industry.
After 5 years I moved into life sciences as I had an opportunity to work for a global pharmaceutical company, Mundipharma, based in Cambridge. I thought now is a really good time for me to build on my global career as I was really enjoying working with people in different parts of the world, and so understanding different cultures was a key driver.
I love life sciences – there are so many reasons why this is a fantastic space to be in, but the purpose of what we do is incredibly compelling. What we do everyday does actually make a difference to people’s lives.
Having seen the difference that medicines / therapies / medical devices etc. make to people’s lives, I knew I was never going to leave life sciences. I worked at Mundipharma for 8 years but when the opportunity came along to work more in the biotech R&D part of the healthcare lifecycle, I knew it was too good an opportunity to miss.
What do you feel is important for an employer to consider when growing a company, from a people perspective?
I believe that learning and development and career progression / opportunities are super important. Our workforce are incredibly driven and want to visualize where their career is going and understand the career development frameworks and what progression looks like for them. This isn’t always about promotions and people management responsibilities – it’s also about being exposed to different opportunities for growth, i.e., attending conferences or participating in different projects.
I would say our culture is the pull factor to bring someone towards our organization and I think it’s very palpable. As I said, a key objective of my role was building our brand and our culture with the key goal being to attract and retain talent.
Salary is obviously very important, but actually, what often holds people to organizations is the relationships they share with the people within the organization. The relationship they share with their line manager, with their teammates and their colleagues The small things, such as how it feels when you walk into your work environment – do people say hello, do they ask how you are if you’ve been off sick? Sometimes, it’s these really small interactions that make a big difference.
At Sphere Fluidics, we spent a lot of time thinking about culture and, what we established when we were building out our values is that trust is key. Effectively, trust is doing what you say you’re going to do, giving people certainty, and creating an environment that’s honest where people act with integrity – if you get things wrong, you say you’ve got it wrong and don’t hide behind blame.
We spent a lot of time building out our values and behaviors. Everyone who joins the organization attends a number of workshops, including how to give and receive feedback appropriately, these are immersive and we repeat these learnings on a regular basis. In our company all-hands meetings, we issue employee recognition awards that reference our values as well as our achievements. We also try to reference our values through our everyday activities in order to hold each other to account and that’s across all levels.
To find out more about our values, culture and environment, please visit spherefluidics.com/about-us
