Dunelm Wins Best Place to Work at UK IT Awards 2023
Last week, we won the Best Place to Work trophy at the UK IT Awards, the so-called “Oscars of IT” hosted by the British Computing Society (BCS).
It was a terrific night of dancers, electric strings, bands, DJs, dodgems, games, food and drink but what is it that we do that merits winning the award?
Most of our submission entry submission follows. This got our foot in the door, we then just had the panel interview to navigate…
Unsurprisingly, it follows the points from our earlier article about how to win an industry award
ORGANISATIONAL OVERVIEW
Driven by our purpose “To help create the joy of truly feeling at home, now and for generations to come”, we describe ourselves as a people-led, tech-powered organisation. Our leading-edge technology practices, inclusive workplace, relentless innovation, and clear focus on professional development make us a magnet for top tech talent. Our flexible, hybrid work model and comprehensive benefit system attract diverse expertise, while our comprehensive learning resources and extensive internal progression opportunities foster an environment of continuous growth and achievement.
PROFESSIONALISM
Our tech department is an example of technology professionalism, embodying our core values: acting like owners, keep listening and learning, stronger together and long-term thinking. We ensure the successful use of IT through a clear strategy that aligns all tech work with value streams or “focus areas”, directly tied to our company’s published plan and strategy. This alignment guarantees that every team member understands how their work contributes to our bigger picture, fostering a sense of ownership and dedication.
Our loosely “Spotify Inspired” tech operating model is a testament to our commitment to professional development and technical excellence. We have functional tribes aligned with business capabilities, for example “Stock”, “Stores” and “Total Retail System”, each of which has a clear exec sponsor, defined OKRs, a range of senior tech roles and one or more cross-functional value stream teams. Sitting across the tribes, we have discipline-focused chapters which promote personal growth, career development and professional acumen. All line management sits within the chapters ensuring that personal growth is never limited by functional deliverables.
We are primarily an agile, product-led department but vary our agility depending on the activity to ensure it’s appropriate for the business use case. Developments that are largely unknown, bespoke and require experimentation are typically more agile than those which are like-for-like implementations, commodity off-the-shelf packages or involve contractual relationships. Every team is aligned with a value stream and is cross-functional with members from each chapter to ensure wherever possible the team can get on with their work with minimal dependencies on others. This is empowering for the team and also accelerates our deliveries.
Our teams enjoy the freedom and autonomy to establish their own ways of working, fostering an environment of trust and responsibility. We have a published career progression “tube map” which provides a clear route to career advancement and we’re defining our career framework to provide clear expectations for role progression. Moreover, our commitment to professionalism is exemplified through two of our key charters. The personal development charter, which mandates 10% of everyone’s time to be spent on personal development and the technical debt charter which mandates 20% of everyone’s time is to be spent on paying back technical debt. This ensures that everyone is continuously learning and that our systems don’t become increasingly fragile.
We champion our colleagues to venture outside their comfort zones, advocating for their participation in conferences, podcasts, and webinars. This dual-purpose initiative not only builds their personal brands but also enhances our tech brand externally. We’ve undergone a significant shift in the past year. From a department with virtually no external footprint, we’re now a recognized name, striving to become a magnet for talent. This remarkable transformation attests to our dedication to professionalism in the technology sphere.
EXCELLENCE
We build technology solutions for external customers who use our services to buy homewares and also internal customers who use our services to operate the business. Both are equally important and deserve the same level of service. We use the same metrics to measure service levels for both groups and they’re reported on from the team perspective through to the executive view. This gives our teams clear goals to target along with the understanding of how they ladder up to the bigger picture.
A good example of this is net promoter score. Like many retailers, we measure this for external customers (and ensure it’s visible to the teams developing the technology services) but we also do the same for internal customers (and for our tech colleagues too). This ensures we are continually looking for ways to improve our technology products and services to create more seamless experiences.
Understanding our customers’ needs is vital in a successful technology organisation. We capture these via a variety of mechanisms including customer workshops, focus groups and onsite observations. Sometimes, we can identify needs that are not articulated and this is where tech teams can really shine — delivering something that the customer doesn’t even know they want! We’ve had a number of examples of this and because of our hypothesis-led development approach enabled by our leading-edge technologies, we can try ideas out safely, understand the value they may bring and then delight the customer with something surprising. This works particularly well with internal customers as they expect to be at the back of the queue when it comes to innovation and can be pleasantly surprised when they get something unexpected. We did this recently with our product returns process, which was clunky. We held a hackathon focused on store processes and the winner got productionised and made store colleagues’ lives considerably easier.
Another way we’ve exceeded our internal customers’ expectations is by trialing schemes that are subsequently rolled out across the wider organisation. As a naturally experimental group, we’re always keen to try new approaches to old challenges and our experiences help the rest of the business understand what works and what doesn’t. This hasn’t always been the case, just a couple of years ago, tech was regarded as a dull cost centre, now it’s thought of as an interesting value enabler. To this end, we also look to exceed the expectations of our tech colleagues. We dedicate significant time and energy to ensuring they are able to be their best selves, ensuring inclusivity, flexibility and transparency. Our comprehensive benefits highlight our commitment to employee well-being and satisfaction and include store discount, additional holiday for birthdays, charity work and moving home, holiday carryover and a sharesave scheme among others. We supplement these with additional benefits such as family healthcare, wellbeing subscriptions, personal finance benefits and car purchase schemes. These ensure that each colleague receives benefits that are valuable to them and most have been implemented or enhanced in the last two years.
INNOVATION
Innovation is integral to our tech department’s strategy. It’s important to our colleagues to work on leading tech, but it’s also valued by the whole company as we seek to “Digitalise our Business”. We naturally innovate with technology, but we also innovate with our policies, thinking and ways of working.
From a technology point of view, we use a fully cloud-based technology stack, including the largest AWS Lambda implementation in Europe and an event-driven architecture, we foster a culture of continuous improvement and exploration. This includes leading-edge architecture, approaches and services that aren’t found in many other UK retailer.
We champion innovation through quarterly hackathons, where our entire department and beyond come together to compete on inventive ideas. This provides a platform for our teams to experiment and develop groundbreaking ideas, resulting in everything from in-store gamification, through chat-gpt powered chatbots to AI powered interior design. The most impactful ideas are sponsored by the wider business, who are often judges and built into product roadmaps. These are great for creative technologists but also benefit the business by bringing fresh thinking into often traditional areas.
Innovating with our technology brand is something that’s relatively new. We’ve begun building this over the last couple of years and we’ve seen a change from having to explain why people should want to work here to candidates describing why they should. In addition to speaking opportunities, we also provide a public technology blog (you’re on it!). This is a truly democratised affair, run by colleagues who’ve adopted roles such as ideator, proofreader, author and publisher. We expected to publish a story once a month, but have published every week for the last 2 years with over 50 different authors — everyone has a right to dance! This is becoming increasingly popular and helps establish us as a technology leader.
One of our key strategies is our fully flexible hybrid working model under the banner “feel at home wherever you work”, which offers unparalleled work flexibility. This model enables us to compete for talent with big-tech companies who have started to mandate specific days in the office. That isn’t flexible enough for us and often results in people sitting in offices on video calls, so we’d much rather use in-person time for innovation, collaboration, and networking. We trust our teams to get this right for them and feedback suggests they value that approach.
Another area of innovation is our working groups focused on ways of working which originated from our department wide engagement surveys. The verbatim feedback was grouped into themes and these themes are now run as programs by passionate colleagues at all levels across the organisation. We have groups for many areas including: estimation, working smarter not harder, understanding value and psychological safety. They’re complex areas but benefit from a common language and approach, which these groups bring.
MEASURABLE SUCCESS
Our department’s success is measurable and tangible from a colleague sentiment, a People and a delivery perspective
With colleague sentiment, our annual engagement survey is our biggest indicator. This year, it boasted an 85% participation rate, for a team of over 400 which is our highest ever. Whilst participation is great, it isn’t indicative of positive attitudes, that comes in the form of employee-NPS which is measured as part of it. Again, this year, resulted in our highest ever, showing a consistent increase in advocates for our team. The verbatim feedback has spun off several groups focusing on making it even better next year.
From a People perspective, we’re now running more trials of innovative practices than anywhere else in the business — including overseas working and early careers options. This demonstrates the trust and recognition that we have as a place to try out new ideas. We’ve also facilitated more internal senior promotions than senior external hires, validating our commitment to career development.
For delivery, we have a host of traditional measures, but also make extensive use of the DORA metrics to ensure we’re trending towards safer, faster lead times.
In terms of increasing diversity in a traditionally male-dominated industry, we’ve taken steps to improve our position, including running job adverts through AI anti-bias tools and starting to ensure our interview panels are representative. This is seeing results with more diverse candidates joining. We’ve also partnered with Code First Girls to bring more women into tech, resulting in 6 new female early career engineers joining last year from non-typical backgrounds. This was further enhanced by the publication of our career roadmap highlighting routes into tech from other areas of the business, such as stores, resulting in more internal moves into tech than ever before.
The outcomes from our technical debt charter are closely monitored and for the first time, we can confidently say that we have less high-impact debt than last year. This means our systems are cleaner, easier to build on and accelerates our deliveries.
The consumption of our blogs, podcasts and webinars and the number of public speaking or judging gigs are all increasing showing greater wider interest in what we’re doing but also demonstrating a rising confidence and pride among our tech colleagues.
Our development reviews ensure that everyone’s performance goals ladder up to their line manager and ultimately to the CEO, providing a clear path for measuring success of both delivery and personal ambitions. When coupled with regular one-to-ones and career development conversations we can be sure that everyone understands how their contribution helps the business achieve its goals and how we can help all colleagues achieve theirs.
SUMMARY
Our tech team is a crucible for innovation, collaboration, and professionalism. As a people-led, tech-powered organisation, we’ve created an environment that inspires creativity, inclusivity, and professional growth. Our colleagues aren’t interchangeable resources; they are a diverse, united community of unique individuals committed to a shared purpose.
We leverage leading-edge technology and agile methodologies, valuing attitude and passion over education. Our investment in personal and professional development empowers our teams, fostering a culture of continuous learning. Our flexible work model, comprehensive benefits, and commitment to psychological safety make us a standout employer in the retail industry.
We are not just tech-enabled, but tech-empowered. We use our technological prowess to drive the business forward, innovating constantly, and aiming for excellence in every endeavour. Our achievements are tangible, measured through OKRs, engagement surveys, and the successful delivery of technology systems. Our commitment to measurable diversity and inclusion sets us apart, making our tech department a beacon of modern employment practices.
In conclusion, our unique blend of professionalism, innovation, and a people-first approach made us a compelling choice for the ‘Best Place to Work’ award. We are committed to maintaining and further enhancing this inclusive, innovative, and dynamic environment for the tech professionals who drive our success. We are only as good as our people so we do everything we can to get the best and treat them well, despite a hot tech market, our attrition rates have stayed low and our internal NPS scores have increased.
