Our people are leading the evolution of Ciphr

Over the past four to six weeks, we’ve hit some milestones in our evolution of Ciphr as a company. One of the most significant, for our staff, was an all-hands conference in London on 30 June. This was my first opportunity to see all our people in one place since I started back in February – when I’m in the Marlow office, I usually see the same people week in, and week out (around 40% of our people don’t live in the Marlow area, so that’s hardly a surprise). It was great to see so many people in person, and feel the energy and buzz that comes with getting everyone in the same room.

?

While it was a good opportunity to catch up and have some of those impromptu conversations that it’s harder to have online, there was a more important purpose to our conference. It was a line in the sand: an opportunity to set out our plans for evolving Ciphr from the business it is today, to a leader in the underserved HR software market for small- and medium-sized businesses. We are on the road to creating a Ciphr that builds on what we have achieved so far and creates true partnerships with its customers and delivers lasting impact, value, and growth. Our new vision, and brand story – all of which will be revealed in the coming months – will help to unite our teams internally (including employees from our acquisitions: Payroll Business Solutions , Digits LMS , and Marshall E-Learning Consultancy ), and help us deliver a better service to our customers.

And that’s something we need to do urgently. While the conference was a chance for our teams to celebrate recent successes, it was also an opportunity to review the impact of when we don’t get things right – and the huge business benefit for our customers when we do. My thanks to Crisis , Maintel , Reconomy UK , and UK Finance for sharing those insights with us, which have helped to give context and weight to the projects we’re all working so hard on.

Ciphr’s ‘secret sauce’ is its people, so I’m delighted to have welcomed even more new starters in recent weeks. We are also on the hunt for our chief technology officer (CTO). The last month or so without a CTO has given Ciphr’s engineering leaders a chance to shine and I am helping them implement their own ideas on how we can improve. I have to admit, while engineering is not anywhere in my background, I am thoroughly enjoying the learning opportunity that this situation has provided. It has also allowed me to work really closely with our newest non-executive director, Badrudin Khan , whose fresh pair of eyes is helping us optimise our product release process and therefore deliver a more reliable service to our customers.

As CEO, it's my job to provide Ciphr employees with the framework to flourish and evolve, and, to a certain extent, let them get on with it. That’s why we’ve created an XLT – extended leadership team – of managers from all departments whose priority is to offer insight into particular projects. The first of those is our ‘future of work’ project, which is split into four workstreams: ways of working; communications and engagement; hybrid working; and people management. It’ll be within these workstreams where we will be considering: where should our physical office be? In fact, do we need an office? (spoiler alert…I am sure we do!) How will we make hybrid working really work? What ground rules do we need in place to make sure we use all our various communications channels in the best way? And what makes for a great Ciphr manager?

These questions will be familiar to hundreds, if not thousands, of other organisations (and their HR teams) across the UK. As we start to figure out our way forward, we’ll share our learnings (and failings) transparently, so you can learn too. It’s all part of our vision to become a true partner to HR and people teams in the UK. Watch this space for more next month and, as ever, if you have any comments or feedback, drop a message below or connect with me here on LinkedIn.?