An open reply to management - Anonymous employee Informed Solutions Employee Review

Thank you for your feedback and we agree that your review is neither hateful nor trolling, and are happy to respond to your comments in an equally thoughtful and respectful manner. Those of us at Informed like that our management team and People Services team spend a lot of time and effort on training, coaching and team building with us. Whilst your manager may not have agreed with, or been able to approve some of the requests that you made, in my experience, that situation is true of anyone that you work with, whether clients, managers or your own colleagues. The workplace mirrors life in general, including outside of work - people agree on certain things and not on others. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t listened to you. I’ve worked at Informed for 7 years and haven’t always agreed with my line manager, colleagues or clients and haven’t always been given what I asked for, however, I reflect and discuss openly with my manager. My experience is that our senior team always listens, are thoughtful, trusted and respected by our people and clients for their integrity, fairness and competence. As you will know from having worked here, everyone at Informed is busy and it takes effort and commitment for senior people to make time to coach and guide less experienced colleagues. Leaders make the time to offer feedback to their people purely to help them play to their strengths, be aware of areas for improvement and development, and to help them succeed in their jobs. We have a diverse workplace and everyone is asked to be open to and constructive about differences of opinion and we always take the time to discuss and explore alternatives. With regard to unpaid work and long hours – there is a clearly defined and articulated rewards scheme at Informed Solutions, which takes into consideration people’s effort and commitment to longer hours from time to time to meet deadlines on client and company initiatives. I and my other colleagues share a professional desire to work hard and achieve great things. The salary benchmarking process is fair, transparent and consistent, and we understand that we’re well paid, receive very good benefits and can be awarded generous bonuses when times are good. Our commitment to each other, our clients and doing challenging innovation work to a high standard is personally very satisfying and it has also seen Informed grow sustainably through the last 10 years. I don’t agree that there is a culture of ‘Presenteeism’; sometimes defined as showing up to work whether sick or not and not operating at normal levels of productivity. The career paths at Informed are centred around innovation and consultancy services and it’s made clear from the start (when people apply to join us) that we need to work alongside clients, alliance partners, other suppliers as well as our own team members. This means that we can’t work whatever hours we want, from wherever we want, because team working and collaboration are key professional requirements. That said, many staff take advantage of Informed’s flexible working arrangements including part time working, different start and end times, and working remotely when we have agreed work plans. This allows us appropriate personal flexibility whilst enabling us to be professional and collaborate properly with others. COVID-19 will undoubtedly bring other changes to the way we all work. Informed’s approach to flexibility is clearly successful because for the past seven weeks we’ve been working remotely in fully distributed teams and doing it very well. A commitment to great team working and everyone being flexible has enabled the entire company, every one of our alliance partners and every client to execute full remote working in a matter of days when government announced business lock-down. Finally, to anyone that doesn’t know us directly and is reading these reviews, Informed Solutions is a successful scale-up company (i.e. we’ve grown at over 20% year-on-year for the past five years). We’ve won many top industry awards, including the Queen’s Award for Innovation. In the current COVID-19 climate, every business is affected but all of us that work at Informed are proud and determined to support each other’s wellbeing and work together through these challenges. We understand that not everyone will agree with how the company operates because it can’t align with every different person’s views or needs. Our purpose, mission and management culture is clearly professional and very modern and I think that is evident in how everyone at Informed pulls together to do an amazing job on high stakes innovation projects; how we celebrate success and the good times; and how (especially now) we rally and double down to get through the tough times. Sara Di Domenico, Lead Consultant