LONDON, July 6, 2016
Reward Gateway, the leading employee engagement platform that delivers employee benefits, recognition, and communications solutions to over 1,200 clients across the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, today announced it has opened its new London hub at 265 Tottenham Court Rd, London W1T 7RQ.
The new office is a collaboration between the company, commercial design specialist Area Sq, and workspace strategy consultants Brightspot. Eighteen months in the making, the facility is designed to embody what the company strives to help its customers achieve every day: attract, engage, and retain employees. The project is a showcase of the company’s culture and a case study in employee collaboration and consultation.
The opening of the new office brings the Reward Gateway mission – let’s make the world a happier place to work – to life for its London-based employees. The office was designed to reflect its core values: work hard, own it, think global, speak up, push the boundaries, love your job, delight your customers, and be human.
The office pushes the boundaries of modern workplace design. The agile workspace features areas for collaboration, teamwork and quiet, private thinking in recognition of the different activities all staff do during the day. Rather than assigning staff to fixed desks, they are free to choose where to sit depending on what they are doing. Quiet reflection rooms are available for focus and thought. A state-of-the-art video studio supports the production of transparent and human communications for its employees and customers. Meeting rooms are equipped with the latest cable and controller-free video conferencing from Silicon Valley startup Highfive, helping the 85 London-based employees to more easily collaborate with the 350 person global workforce located across the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Australia, Macedonia, and the United States.
Reward Gateway believe that a workforce built from the most diverse set of people will make the company most successful. With this belief as a guide to create an inclusive and welcoming workplace, the office offers hotel-standard gender-neutral bathroom facilities accessorized by Danish company Vipp with products from Aesop and ghd. As a beacon employer offering cutting edge benefits, and helping its clients to do the same, employees can take advantage of a year’s paid parental leave for any primary caregiver, male or female.
The full staffed HR Hero Café puts clients in the heart of the company’s new London hub, with clients encouraged to drop in and pick up coffee, WiFi and even free HR books whenever they are passing by. Meeting and conference facilities are available for free use by HR professionals and even client board meetings.
A Tracey Emin installation “Be Brave” frames the HR Hero Café. It was purchased at auction with all proceeds going to charity supporting the Terrence Higgins Trust. In addition to other sustainable features, the donation highlights why Reward Gateway recently won the BVCA award for best management team focused on corporate and social responsibility for their work supporting voluntary organizations and charities.
In addition to using the company mission and values for design direction, Reward Gateway adhered to Dieter Rams’ ten principles for good design. These are the same principles that the company uses to design its products, which state that good design is: innovative, makes a product useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long lasting, thorough down to the last detail, environmentally friendly, and uses as little design as possible. Some of Europe’s leading furniture designers are represented in the space and 5 separate pieces are in the permanent collection at MoMA in New York.
By putting people first, the 10-year-old company continues to outperform. Glenn Elliott, recently named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year with 99% CEO approval rating on Glassdoor, has led his company to a $220M investment from Boston-based Great Hill Partners, and a 45% increase in company profits.
About Reward Gateway
Reward Gateway provides employee engagement technology to the world’s leading companies. Over 1,200 clients including American Express, Groupon, Yahoo!, IBM and McDonald’s use the company’s products to attract, engage and retain the best employees. The company’s products power employee communications, employee recognition, and employee benefits through a single employer-branded hub called SmartHub®.