We’re so excited to announce that Cognota has officially been certified as a Great Place to Work!
Over the past few years, we’ve been busy building a team that we are super proud to work with every day. And providing a great place for our team to work together is an important part of our core values.
But we also felt it was important to gather a deeper understanding of how our workplace measures up and whether there are any core areas we could improve. So, we got in touch with the Great Place to Work program and embarked on a journey to validate our efforts to provide an enjoyable, motivational, and fulfilling work environment for our team.
About Great Place to Work
The Great Place to Work organization is a global authority on workplace culture. They work with organizations of all sizes and industries to analyze employee trust scores.
The goal of the Great Place to Work program is to look deeper than the “perks” and examine all aspects of a company’s workplace culture. By doing this, they aim to establish and standardize what it really means to be a great place to work.
The best way to do this, of course, is to get feedback directly from the employees themselves.
The Certification Process
Using their Trust Model, the Great Place to Work organization has devised surveys that are designed to get feedback from employees on multiple aspects of the company’s culture and practices. The surveys encompass a wide range of indexes including credibility, respect, fairness, pride, and camaraderie.
One of the first steps in the certification process was to gather responses to the GPTW survey from all Cognota employees in Canada. All survey responses were anonymous so employees could feel comfortable sharing their honest opinions and feedback.
Survey responses were fed directly back to Great Place to Work so they could analyze them against their Trust Model and provide Cognota with an overall Trust Score. The survey results were extremely positive and passed the Trust Score criteria for certification. So, with that, Cognota became an official Great Place to Work!
What Certification Means for Cognota
Over the past 18 months in particular, working from home provided us with some unique challenges and opportunities to solidify the culture we’ve worked hard to build. Our culture committee was busy organizing virtual events to keep the team connected. Our leadership team executed a communication strategy to keep the entire team in the loop as events progressed. Every team member was allocated a budget to furnish their work-from-home station. We also focused on prioritizing our team’s mental health with regular days off (known as “You” Days) and a special seminar with mental health advocate, Jeff Riesley from the Sales Health Alliance, to open up important conversations and reflection on how our team members can look after themselves and each other.
Over the last couple of years, Cognota has grown to a team of 30 amazing colleagues. As we’ve added to the team, it’s become more important to us than ever to ensure we’re providing a space where people can do their very best work. As our start-up keeps growing, results like this also enable us to continue connecting with the best and brightest candidates to continue building a great company together, now and in the future.
Recognition like this from Great Place to Work validates that the effort we put into providing a positive workplace environment is successful and highlights areas where we’d like to continue improving. We couldn’t be more grateful to our team for embracing uncertainty, breaking down the walls, and keeping it win-win. These core values embodied by our Cognotars are the reason we’re celebrating this certification as a Great Place to Work.
