Why this finalist deserves to win Best Tech Work Culture:
At Rokt, we have a culture built on innovation, creativity, and education at all levels and have introduced multiple initiatives that reinforce this.
The technology we provide for our clients is completely groundbreaking, and so innovation is at the heart of who we are. Rokt sees opportunities where others don’t – our product does that in the Transaction Moment™ (the ecommerce transaction journey). Similarly, our culture is all about finding ways to be groundbreaking as a place to work.
Over the past year, we have strengthened our commitment to our 200+ employees with several initiatives meant to foster growth in both the culture and the company as a whole. Every quarter, we bring together our regional offices for team training – complete with dedicated breakout sessions where employees have direct input into the future of our technology and our business. Clients are invited along too – to help drive product innovation and meet their biggest business challenges.
Team training is just one of the better than standard benefits we offer our Rokt’stars - fully funded healthcare, lunch three times a week, and a generous PTO policy are available in all our markets. Every employee is entitled to a ‘High 5!’ an additional 5 days off every year if their leave balance falls below 5 come 31st December. We recognize the value in rest & relaxation - a happy team is a more efficient team. Oh, and did we mention that most of our offices are dog friendly?
Career development is our number one company goal in 2019. In addition to an individual allowance of $3,000 USD a year to further your learning - every employee is eligible for promotion each quarter depending on performance and manager discretion. We recently made all salaries and job expectations across the entire company transparent so that every individual understands the opportunities available to them and can work with their manager to strive towards these.
As a start-up founded by and led by working parents, we appreciate the importance of parental leave. In 2019 we introduced 16 weeks paid leave for the primary caregiver and 4 weeks paid leave for the secondary caregiver with lots of flexible options for returning to work when you’re ready, including part-time, unpaid leave and ramping back up slowly.
Being part of a global team with 8 global offices can be challenging. We recognize this and ensure that at least once a year we bring the entire company together for our annual ‘Global Kickoff’ Event which conveniently also happens to take place in a tropical location. In January 2020, we will be flying over 200 Rokt’stars to Phuket, Thailand for 5 days of team buiding experiences culminating in the Beetroot awards - an evening where we recognize our Rokt’stars for their efforts in driving forward the company success.
As part of these awards, we highlight employees who’ve gone above and beyond to demonstrate the company values which we see come to life every day across all our teams. Our four company values are:
· We are obsessed with the customer!
· We are smart with humility :)
· We work hard to enjoy the ride.. and,
· We conquer new frontiers
Through living and breathing these values, we often see ‘smart’ initiatives come from ‘humble’ employees within the team. Our Employee Fellowship Program is the most recent example of initiatives born from the bottom up. The purpose of the program is to support our goal of career development and inspire our Rokt’stars in their career paths by allowing them to shadow coworkers in different departments, gaining exposure to new roles and the tasks, responsibilities, challenges, and skills required.
We truly care about building a sustainable, long term business that delivers for our clients and also for our team – as with the fellowship program, we want to encourage and support initiatives important to our Rokt’stars. Some of our very best culture ideas come from our Rokt’stars themselves - from our ‘Rokt Environment Group’ who work hard to deliver important planet-aware programs from how to minimize garbage in every office, maximize recycling, distribute uneaten food and snacks to those in need, to our ‘Women who Rokt’ club who are proud to have a mix of male and female members through to our very active Social Clubs including Yoga, Cycle and cooking classes.
Our awards is not the only time we acknowledge each other. We also have a dedicated “Thank you” chat channel that allows coworkers to recognize each other for going above and beyond their responsibilities to help a fellow Rokt’star while also embodying one of our four core values. ‘Thank You’ messages fly in from our 8 global offices constantly and others respond and applaud the recognition.
Rokt places a big emphasis on technical creativity and innovation. We embody this through our ambitious value: “Conquer New Frontiers” – we are a team of curious explorers always looking for a better way to solve challenges and continuously keep innovating our approaches, for internal processes as well as our core business. We regularly host 24-hour hackathons, dubbed pointedly as ‘Roktathons’, where cross-functional teams are invited to innovate and develop solutions to anything that inspires them and relates to our core business, products, technology platforms, offices, people or processes. During our summer 2018 Rok’tathon, one team built a prototype mobile app that would allow our commercial teams to access key functionalities from our complex platform when on the move – a tool that we had no plans to develop at the time. After seeing the immediate effectiveness and wide-spread company support of the prototype, we developed the application into a fully functioning tool in the second half of 2018.
One of the things we are most proud of is our ‘boomerang’ culture. Over the past few years we’ve had multiple Rokt’stars take a sabbatical to travel, try a new passion, a new city or even a new job, and rejoin the Rokt team shortly thereafter which is a testament to our strong culture. Many Rokt’stars also work with us on global relocation opportunities should they wish to try another market - we’re always open to it and encourage the conversation.
In order for a company to be innovative, they must have a culture that is flexible and promotes ideas – free of egos and other negative factors which might keep employees from sharing their ideas or stifle their creativity to begin with. Our company emphasises transparency and proudly promotes multiple open channels for questions and ideas. We have a google chat channel called ‘Ask the CEO’ where all employees are encouraged to submit questions (anonymously if they like) which the CEO answers openly and truthfully. We run regular internal surveys to make sure we’re acting in the best interests of our team - our most recent internal employee Net Promoter Score (NPS) was 86 - considered ‘World Class’!
Where many a tech company struggles to be profitable, we have always been so and it is our team of Rokt’stars who are responsible for this success.
At Rokt, we celebrate our wins, learn from our failures, and have fun while doing so. We call ourselves Rokt’stars for a reason.
