We must be getting old. Three years ago we were a bunch of freelancers that cooked each other lunch, and now we’re doing staff surveys. The good news is that the results suggest that we haven’t lost most of the good bits that come from being a group of friends that work together. At least we’re not as bad as the BBC or Telegraph yet.
Broad agreement
The first thing we noticed that we broadly agreed about the state of the company. There was near unanimous support for the statements “I feel there are one or more Outlanders that I could go to if I had a problem”, “I’d recommend Outlandish to potential clients”, and “I’d recommend Outlandish as a place to work” and we’d expect nothing less – in fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that our newest recruit Ronald had only been with us for 10 days.
As well at a large number of things that we agreed strongly on, there were quite a lot of things that we all agreed to “Neither agree nor disagree” with such as the amount of pro-bono work we do (already quite a lot), the amount of profit we make (currently about 10% of turnover).
Other highlights included general disagreement to the idea that we should work for fewer clients (good news for those of you who thought you’d driven us to our wits’ end); no-one wanted “more money and do less interesting work” (good news for those of you with no money) and no one wanted to publish their desire to “get rid of one or more of our clients” (you know who you are).
There’s also a bunch of stuff about things we want to improve and change, and some stuff we totally disagree about. The four founders all have one or more areas of their job they wish didn’t exist, and the newer members wanted more responsibility, which works out nicely.
Also, only Matt Kendon (my cousin) and I would rather be famous than rich, and only Matt Crow wants my job. I’ve got your number Mr Crow.
You can download the full results here: outlandish questions 2014 we’ve even made the spreadsheet all pretty