The Field People Team: Reflections 1 Year In

Written By: Rose Stott, Caitlin Seaman, Rachael Leinster
Posted 12 May 2023
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Field takes a really progressive view of the role that the People team play. We want to ensure that  the team has the skills to deliver more than just basic process and compliance, and can build a vibrant, inclusive culture that will scale as the business grows, in the UK and internationally.

Meet the People team

Rose - Head of People

With 14 years experience in HR / People roles, Rose has worked in various industries, including Retail, Advertising, FinTech and now Energy. She has experience in running multidisciplinary people teams covering all aspects of people, including recruitment, training, engagement, reward, business partnering, compliance and physical environment. In her last role at Wise she led an international team covering three continents, so is well placed to help Field navigate the challenges of global expansion.

Caitlin - People Experience Manager

Caitlin began her career in People Experience at fast-growth shaving subscription brand Harry’s Grooming in 2019 - initially as Workplace Coordinator, then Manager. She moved to menswear brand Spoke as Workplace Manager, before joining Field in June 2022 as People Experience Manager. Caitlin looks after all things experience, communications, culture and physical workplace at Field.

Rach - Talent Acquisition Specialist

Rach began her recruitment career in 2018, as a Recruitment Consultant, then Senior Recruitment Consultant at Gattaca, a multinational recruitment agency, looking after technology hiring. She then set up the Technology vertical for a start-up, and got a taste for all things process. Rach joined Field in October 2021. As the Talent Acquisition Manager, Rach has built out the UK team, and is now focused on hiring our international teams as we continue to scale rapidly.

Why Field?

Rose

  1. The opportunity to have a big impact on a small but growing business - to lay the foundations and foster the kind of culture I want to work for and be part of.
  2. The chance to leverage my previous experience while working part time (work/life balance is crucial for me). Field were open minded to me shaping the role around my availability, which in turn means they get my full attention and energy - I’m genuinely so much more productive these days!
  3. Luke and Amit (our CCO and CEO) are good people with tons of experience, working together to build something amazing. Field is full of people I respect, can learn from and who welcome my perspective. Being in a team of experts who are all learning from one another, while lending their own individual expertise is really inspiring.

Caitlin

  1. Being able to join so early in the business growth journey, with a completely blank canvas to build from scratch was very exciting. Being able to take what I’ve learned over my career and build from the ground up.
  2. Field’s company mission is exciting and impactful, and something I consciously wanted to contribute to. I wanted to be a part of something that was set up to do good and have an impact on real, current issues.
  3. The fact that Field considered the importance of the People team function at such an early stage - not only from a business-critical HR perspective, but also from a cultural and experiential perspective. This was very attractive and exciting - it really showed me that the team understood the importance of these roles in a developing company, and getting them in at the right stage to have a meaningful impact.

Rachael

  1. Having the autonomy to help build something from nothing was one of the big draws for me; being involved from when the team was only 8 to now over 50 team members in multiple countries has been an incredible journey!
  2. I’ve worked with a lot of businesses that see recruitment as a ‘necessary evil’, something that they have to do but don’t care about. At Field the engagement with recruitment, from not just the senior leadership team but the entire business, is a breath of fresh air
  3. Field’s focus and determination to do something positive for future generations is something I massively admire. I’ve never had the pleasure of working with such a passionate, intelligent, and humble group of people before.

What have the last 12 months looked like?

Fun facts

  • The team has grown from 25 to 46 in the last 12 months, including starting to build two new international teams in Italy and Spain.
  • The People team have delivered 7 training sessions, on subjects including hybrid working, effective feedback, mental wellbeing and inclusive hiring practices.
  • 6 new benefits have been introduced, including the ability to work from anywhere in the world, time off for eco-related volunteering and weekly team meals so we all get down-time together.
  • 227 interviews have been completed.
  • 15 sets of processes have been defined (e.g. onboarding, benchmarking, feedback and performance reviews) to help the business continue to deliver on our values as we grow.

Things we’ve delivered

It’s been a busy year as we’ve been building the foundations for our future growth. Field will one day be a large international business and we wanted to make sure we're set up for that growth from day one.

We started with defining our values. These describe how we all work to achieve our company mission, and the characteristics that we most value in one another. They emphasise teamwork and collaboration, technical expertise and deep knowledge, curiosity and continuous development, and, above all else, personal and organisational integrity. Our values have allowed us to see more clearly where the current gaps are and what our future needs may be, so we could focus our energies to have the biggest impact.

We could see that there were opportunities to improve our hiring practices, to make sure we’re selecting people who are right for our culture, as well as describing our ways of working to potential new hires more clearly. So we created a comprehensive hiring toolkit which provides everything needed to make the end-to-end process as efficient as possible. We also trained the team on the role that unconscious bias plays in hiring decisions, and some practical steps they can take to overcome their biases so we can continue to hire the best additions to our team.

As we’re approaching our one year anniversary at Field, so are many people in the wider team, which is why we saw the need to define our performance review process. Using our values as a guide, we opted for a 360 feedback process which places self evaluation and peer relationships at the centre. Then we created a process guide and a set of templates to help Fielders take charge of planning their own professional development, since we believe that self-directed learning is the most impactful.

To help Fielders see their growth over time and make sure everyone is being fairly compensated, we introduced role levels across all teams, and then completed a thorough benchmarking exercise with each sub-team. As a result, every Fielder has visibility over the expectations of their role (through their team’s bespoke career map), the next role in their development path and knows what they need to do to get there. They also know how their current salary has been set and what they can do to improve it in time.

To help us monitor how these new tools were working in practice, we ran our first employee survey at the end of 2022. In this, we asked about a whole range of things, from day to day workload, to team lead relationships, views on the leadership team and how well Fielders felt recognised and rewarded for their contribution. The results were really insightful, and allowed us to complete team-specific action planning to help solve some local problems - as well as pointing us towards some shared experiences across teams. We’ll repeat this again every 6 months so that we can see how Fielders feel over time, and so we can continue to focus on the things that will have the biggest positive impact for the team.

One of the greatest opportunities for impact was the creation of a set of tools which allowed the Field team to self-serve and independently further their own development and knowledge. We’ve just officially launched the team Intranet - Fieldnet, where the team can find information on everything from benefits, to development plans, to guides on recruitment and hiring, and everything in between. We’re particularly keen on empowering and providing the tools that the team needs to work independently.

We knew the importance of having established working groups for both mental health and EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion), but were conscious that we didn’t want them to be specifically People-team lead. So, we put our feelers out and created two cross-functional teams for both of these areas, with representatives from each team function and spanning all levels of seniority in the business. Specifically, our mental health group was set up in partnership with Field’s Health and Safety Manager, Andy. These teams have been cracking on with work, with input from the People team and have already started making great progress.

In summer 2022, we organised and ran Field’s first all-team business offsite, with the intention of getting everyone away for a day to team-build, learn something new and spend some quality time together away from our desks. We’ve also made a point of celebrating company milestones and wins, with regular team socials, including competitive baking, bowling and a Christmas cooking party. Inclusivity and accessibility is a priority when planning our team socials- it’s important that every Fielder feels that they can come along and enjoy the event, so we usually centre it around an activity, with food and drink options to suit the team.

Top 3 learnings so far: a look back after a year at Field

Rose

  1. The fun that comes with building an inclusive culture with such disparate employee groups - we have people who’ve joined from fast growing tech startups, from corporate consultancies, and from international energy infrastructure companies. They each bring their own employee experiences, expectations and cultural norms, and finding ways to integrate them all into a seamless, shared culture has been a really fun, iterative learning curve.
  2. It’s great to work in a business with no cultural ‘debt’ from previous cultural mis-steps. Lots of companies build their people teams too late in the business’s growth, meaning much of the infrastructure is lacking and the team aren’t able to proactively support the business as they’d like.
  3. My work/life balance has never been better - I can’t recommend highly enough how great it is to work part time in a business that gives us the flexibility to manage our delivery in the ways that work best for us

Caitlin

  1. Thoughtful development of culture and norms across an expanding international team has been really fun and I’ve learned so much already. Having only worked with teams based in the UK previously, it’s been great to learn more about our international teams’ cultures and how we can best create company norms that will grow and iterate as we scale.
  2. With so much to do, figuring out how to prioritise what needs to be done first and where to focus my attention has been a real learning curve. For my own personal development, being able to look at a long to-do list and understand what is a ‘need to have’ VS a ‘nice to have’, and how to make those things happen when they’re most needed.
  3. The importance of creating inclusive rituals, e.g. turning ad-hoc team drinks into a more thoughtful and encompassing benefit like all-team lunch once a week. Drinks would usually see 25% of the team attend, and now everyone can get together once a week and have a meal together, which has gone down a total storm.

Rachael

  1. Building recruitment and hiring best practice into the DNA of the company culture, and involving the entire business in how we shape and manage our processes. This means they’re both super efficient and also seamlessly integrated into everyone’s day to day roles.
  2. When we began to look at our international hiring strategy, I assumed that attitudes and cultures would be similar in western Europe….how wrong I was; it’s been incredibly fun learning, exploring and evolving!
  3. You can never complete recruitment - sometimes it’s great to take a moment to sit back and see how the team has grown and the great things the business has been able to achieve with everyone onboard.