A workplace where you can be yourself – how Metacore builds excellence employee experience

How to build a world-class employee experience during a stage of high growth? We have scaled our team from 40 to 160+ Metacoreans in the past 1.5 years. This kind of fast scaling could potentially challenge the culture and the excellent employee experience we want to serve our people. Read how we have managed to deal with these challenges and how our hard work of fostering a culture where employees can thrive has paid off.

At Metacore, our culture is essential for our success – how we aspire to be, how we work together to achieve our goals and what kind of employee experience we want to provide for Metacoreans. Everyone at Metacore is responsible for upholding our culture and we believe it must grow with us to ensure we thrive in our fast-paced environment.

The cornerstones of our culture – trust, psychological safety, autonomy, and work-life balance – are present in our every day, or at least should be. That’s why we regularly measure our employee experience to make sure we live up to our aspirations.

Metacoreans recommend Metacore as a workplace

At Metacore, we apply evidence-based management to create an excellent employee experience. Evidence-based management helps us to create hypotheses about how things are going, test these hypotheses, and make more informed decisions based on the evidence. Using surveys and organizational data is one part of evidence-based decision-making, together with knowledge from scientific research, interviews with stakeholders, and input from experts.

The Siqni survey is one way we quantitatively measure our employee experience. The survey shows us what factors are most meaningful to our employees and how well they are realized in our everyday life. It also tells us how satisfied Metacoreans are with us as an employer and if they would recommend us to others. The results guide us in developing areas that are truly important for our employees, which in turn supports developing an excellent employee experience and culture.

Our employee satisfaction score is 88 (out of a maximum of 100), which is a great result. It has remained the same since last year – an impressive achievement given our fast growth.

Another great result is our eNPS – employee net promoter score – that currently stands at 69 and increased from last year's score of 60. This is well above the 40 mark which is considered excellent and means that our employees would recommend Metacore as an employer to others.

It was especially nice to see that our results had improved despite us being in a phase of fast growth and change. Our relentless work on building our culture that helps us grow sustainably and keeping our people-first mindset have helped in this. When the foundation is in place, the other aspects will follow more easily.

Work-life balance is the most meaningful in our every day

Employee experience is a complex topic, but the Siqni survey gives us data on what makes us Metacoreans tick, and what's truly important.

The top 10 factors we value as the most meaningful are:

1. Work-life balance
2. Fair salary and perks
3. Freedom to work regardless of time or place
4. Ability to make decisions independently
5. Possibility to influence my own work and working environment
6. The working environment where you can be yourself
7. Professional colleagues
8. Meaningful work assignments
9. Development opportunities which match my own interests
10. Open communication in issues regarding work and organization

Work-life balance is the most important factor to over 50% of Metacoreans. We put a lot of emphasis on this in our day-to-day, despite working in an industry as hectic as mobile gaming.

We turn aspirations into reality

Siqni survey also measures how these meaningful factors are actually realized across the company. Understanding which things are meaningful is nice, but seeing whether these things are happening or not shows us where our attention should be focused.

For Metacoreans, these are the 5 things realized best in their day-to-day:

1. The working environment where you can be yourself
2. Work-life balance
3. Freedom to work regardless of time or place
4. Professional colleagues
5. Open communication in issues regarding work and organization

These results show us that our culture really is coming true. We have actually been able to improve the results during our high growth, which makes us even more proud of the work we’ve put in. And it is not just about the quantitative results, the open answers are a gold mine too, which help us to understand the results even better.

Psychological safety and autonomy go hand in hand

We work hard to create psychological safety, foster work-life balance, and provide autonomy for everyone. We do this because research shows that psychological safety fosters creativity, efficiency, and healthy feedback. Our work is reflected in the survey results, with one in three Metacoreans naming “a working environment where you can be yourself” as a meaningful factor. What is even better is that the same number of respondents reported that it’s realized at Metacore.

Autonomy is one of the cornerstones of Metacore’s culture, and the results show that our employees value it as well. A third of Metacoreans chose freedom to work regardless of time or place, the ability to make decisions independently and the opportunity to influence the company’s working environment as meaningful factors in their work life. The responses also showed that our employees felt that they are present in our culture and everyday work.

In a phase of high growth and constant change, active change management and communication is key to keeping everyone in the loop and committed. Which is why it’s especially nice to see that Metacoreans feel they are involved in decision-making and that our communication is open and transparent.

Proud to be a Future Workplace

Our results show that we have managed to uphold our desired workplace culture and even improved on our employee experience despite our rate of growth and the high-pressure environment of building mobile games. Our culture is the compass that guides us, and listening and taking care of our employees helps us to achieve our ambitions.

Based on our great results, we were granted the Future workplaces certification. This certification is given to companies which have created an exceptional workplace culture based on understanding the needs of employees, describes a workplace where meaningful factors are realized, and where employees recommend the employer to others. Hooray for that!

However, we recognize that results like these aren't in any way fixed or final – or something taken for granted. Upholding them requires constant work from everyone in our team. Based on these results, we’ll continue to foster trust and psychological safety, build a culture of high-care and high-performance, and develop all factors that are meaningful to Metacoreans – both present and future. And we’ll continue to follow-up, listen to, and involve our people, to make sure we stay on course and reach for the stars.

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