Health, Happiness, & Well-being

Physical Wellness

Our goal is to promote the integration of physical health at work by:

Encouraging fitness activity during the day, such as making use of the free building gym in our Denver office during work hours, or by offering a Cycle to Work Scheme (London).
Our Health & Wellbeing Culture Hub offers tips and advice to help our people achieve their health goals, specifically focusing on stress management, work-life balance, mental health, fitness and nutrition. We host ongoing challenges and events around all things health and wellbeing.
Encouraging alternative methods for transportation to work, such as walking, biking, or running.
Training on proper ergonomics while working and providing customized work spaces to accommodate individual needs (standing desks, ergonomic keyboards/mice, etc).
Providing healthy snacks and foods in meetings and company events.
Providing natural, filtered drinking water and organic, GMO-free, chemical-free kitchen supplies.

Our 2023/2024 impact:

46% of our people participated in our Global Relay Race fundraiser where they walked, jogged, cycled or skateboarded a total of 232.5km kilometres. We gave donations to PBIC and the American Red Cross.
Signed the Working with Cancer pledge to help end the stigma and insecurity people with cancer face in the workplace.
In Denver, we increased our benefits subsidies for individual medical coverage by 13 percentage points (~76% is Wordbank-paid coverage) Our goal is to increase that to 80% Wordbank-paid coverage.
100% of our people had access to standing desks.
Hosted a Sleep Challenge Week with daily challenges to improve the quality and amount of sleep and shared our process

Work/Life Balance

Freedom and flexibility is key to life at Wordbank. We look at work as a partnership where we provide flexibility to our people around how, when, and where they work and we expect the same flexibility in return. Embracing flexibility means

Offering hybrid-remote working options including ad hoc secondary remote locations outside primary country of residency.
Providing a flexible working environment, allowing people to manage their own time during the day, and balancing work & life commitments as they see fit.
We’re also committed to supporting our working mothers and fathers to ensure they can take time to be with their growing families and also return to work in a manner that helps them be successful.
- We offer generous staged return-to-work flexible schedule options that allow our staff members to ease back into work life, while still providing financial stability for families.
- Support for returning new mothers with a private place for expressing breastmilk and refrigeration options.

Our 2023/2024 impact:

We implemented a new Flexible Time-off program where we don’t put limits on what personal time people can take, but now require a minimum of 23 days off per year.
Our London office increased their remote working allowance to £500 to help with energy costs.
We also implemented Birthday Leave to encourage people to take their birthdays off.
38% of our staff worked remotely 90% of the time.
Our people took 75% of all their accrued PTO.

Mental Health

Mental and emotional health are integral parts to our overall health and wellbeing We promote mental health and improved happiness by:

Providing the use of resources, such as Headspace, Calm, and Gratitude Journal 365, for meditation, gratitude, and happiness.
Providing a professional Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for our Denver team that has personal assistants, 24/7 counseling recommendations and consultations, wellness resources, and legal/financial advisors.
Providing a wellbeing grant (London) to use on anything related to health & wellbeing.
Regularly sharing educational materials and encouraging people to share personal stories about struggles with mental health issues to help reduce the stigma. 27% of our managers are certified in Mental Health First Aid.
Running regular #smallstuffmatters campaigns. A vast array of ‘small stuff’ like the detail of emails, being on time, taking moments for quiet can add up to a big impact.

Our 2023/2024 impact:

We had a 74% overall wellbeing rating on our engagement survey.
Held two “Time to talk” sessions with 47% of our people who came to chat for the UK’s biggest mental health conversation. It’s a day for friends, families, communities and the workplace to come together to talk and listen.
66% of our London people took advantage of the company wellbeing grant.
On Blue Monday, we shared some positive imagery and quotes to reframe the start of the day.
Shared out extensive Wellbeing Library on World Mental Health Day.
Started Wellness Wednesday series where we share Wellness tips and challenges weekly.

Learning & Growth

Our goal is to foster a culture and working environment where continuous learning and development takes place, helping our people gain autonomy, mastery, and purpose within their role, to increase motivation, and enhance engagement. We do this by:

Our Learning Time Off (LTO) program gives time and space for people to be heads-down and focused on learning, and ways to improve. We ask everyone to commit a minimum of 1 day per quarter to ‘extra’ training.
Our Learn Culture Hub group selects a yearly ‘learning theme’ and connects with all Wordbankers to gauge what and how they’d like to learn, focusing on the psychology of effective learning.
Hosting learning workshops, language learning clubs, Peer Mentoring and Food for Thoughts.
Offering standardized core training for everyone, regardless of role or rank.
Offering standardized performance reviews for everyone’s first 90 days, including 360 feedback. Small Improvements system for ongoing performance and objectives monitoring.
Providing JEDI education and training as part of our standard on-boarding and staff development process. This includes cross-cultural awareness & communication training (The Culture Map).
Commitment to promotion-from-within for management and leadership roles based on behaviour, not race, gender, creed, or age.
Providing peer mentorship, Strengths Finder-based coaching, and continuous improvement focus.
Our transparent culture encourages open communication, feedback, and accountability at all levels to make sure everyone’s voice is heard and valued.

Our 2023/2024 impact:

45% of our people received general professional development training.
60% of our people received skills-based training or cross-trained in another area of the company.
50% of people received life skills training. One of our most popular courses was the Financial Wellbeing training in our London office. It covered topvs such as how to approach salary negotiations, financial resiliency, investing, and long-term planning, and financial 1:1s.
8% of people were promoted into new roles, and 7% moved onto a different team within the company.
17% of our people took advantage of our LTO program, logging 303 hours.

Social Connection

We aim to create a supportive and safe environment where people can be themselves, connect in a safe and fun environment, and enjoy being Wordbankers. It’s who we work with, not what we do that brings us joy in our work. We know that when people feel connected and engaged with each other, it boosts their relationships, making communication easier and enhancing overall wellbeing and productivity. We do this by:

Our SMILE Culture Hub organizes activities that keep our people connected (and often laughing), like picnics, lunches and fun in the park; movie and quiz nights.
Encouraging ways for our people to connect and engage with each other outside of the normal working day, such as happy hours, retreats, team lunches, and other team-building activities.
Providing recognition of positive culture and values behaviours (peer-based Wordstar values awards, leadership recognition and reward for all ranks).
Scheduling team bonding activities at various times and places, during work day and after, as well as in-person and remote to allow inclusivity for all to attend, regardless of family status, timezone, or location.
Ensuring that everyone pitches in to tackle ‘office chores’ – they aren’t assigned based on gender, race, rank.
Inviting our freelancers to join office events when they’re in town.

Our 2023/2024 impact:

We achieved 83% global engagement.
Hosted several global culture events (Garthic phone, trivia nights, game nights, coffee/tea remote chats).
10% of people completed cross-office visits.
63% of our network has worked with us for over 5 years, and 22% of our network has worked with us more than 10 years.
Our strong relationships and connection resulted in better quality for our clients too. We had a 99.12% error-free rate globally, across 115 languages, 972 projects, and 75,762 deliverables.
Our clients are happy with us, scoring us a 91% in overall quality and an NPS score of +74, which is in the “excellent” category.