Our mission as a studio is that of Beautility, that's our way of saying making good choices desirable. To achieve this need to make sure this philosophy underpins everything we do.

To get there, we've set out on a studio shakeup, restructuring and reorganising ourselves to meet the following objectives:

• To focus the business on mission and purpose with commercial outcomes. We will maintain a laser-like focus on achieving our goals in a disciplined way to safeguard the financial health of the business
• To create a future-focused and future proof approach to governance, we are going all in on stakeholder governance (a B-Corp requirement), infusing the needs of our stakeholders into both high level and day to day decision making
• To empower and engage all team members to bring our mission to life. Delivering the mission is an all-company responsibility, rather than one for just a few at the top.

Our first step this year was to establish a progressive leadership structure. We have created a ‘Governance Team’ (our version of a Board) that fully represents all parts of the business. Our Governance Team has formal responsibility for ensuring the business is on track. This includes understanding the needs of our BCorp stakeholders, understanding how our decision-making affects our stakeholders and for measuring and reporting progress with stakeholder projects and initiatives.

As well as setting up this Governance Team we have taken a look at our organisational structures to bring team members together in new ways, problem solve collaboratively and share knowledge. Our new groups cover creative output, people and process and each group has wide responsibility and accountability for business improvement. Our day to day problem solving going forward will benefit from wider perspectives and more inclusive discussions, and the decisions we make will be representative of the wider business.

Our main anchor point for bringing our studio philosophy to life is our quarterly ‘Beautility Day’. This is a chance for the whole company to get together to learn, share and build our community. These sessions align with the change in seasons, inspired by natural rhythms and activities on the day link directly to our BCorp responsibilities. We invite all team members to get involved and so far we have trained all team members on the BCorp movement and our role within it, have run workshops to understand our ED&I responsibilities and most recently, one of our team members has led all-company discussions on becoming a plastic-free business.

With our structural changes now in full swing, we have a clear path to progress and lots to do over the next 12 months. We will be formalising ‘Stakeholder Champions’ within the Governance Team to ensure our stakeholder groups are always represented during decision making and establishing a clear set of KPIs that allow us to monitor our impact on our stakeholders.

We will be reworking our Cross-Team management meetings to make sure stakeholder needs are being met day to day as well as at Governance Team level. We want everyone in the studio to get behind these goals and to feel engaged and empowered, and this summer we will roll out a ‘Talent Management Plan’. This plan involves all team members contributing to a definitive set of company Values and Behaviours.

Following this, we are writing clearly defined and consistent job descriptions and managers are receiving training on goal setting and effective performance appraisals. We believe this Talent Management Plan will give us a toolkit of the right values, behaviours, roles and goals; a solid foundation for all of us at Here to harness ambition, smash our goals, and collectively raise the bar.