About: impact.com, the world’s leading partnership management platform, is transforming the way businesses manage and optimize all types of partnerships—including traditional rewards affiliates, influencers, commerce content publishers, B2B, and more.
Location: US, London, Sydney, Shanghai, Oslo, Cape Town, Singapore, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm
Responses by Adam Furness, Managing Director, APAC at impact.com
Irrational love: impact.com’s company culture
Everything we do is centred around creating irrational love; creating irrational love between our clients and the team and irrational love within the team.
I can honestly say that I’ve never worked for an organisation that has such a strong and powerful company culture. It’s a genuine privilege both to help create the culture here in APAC and be nourished by it.
We’re innovators in the field of partnership management technology and we are on a mission to inspire the world with the power of partnerships. This means we’re a high performance company, with high growth and equally high expectations of ourselves and of each other. But because we ask a lot, we also give a lot. Our team (even before COVID) has a huge amount of autonomy, support and flexibility.
People are able to dictate their own hours, have unlimited annual leave days, are given a clearly defined career path and always know where they stand with a feedback loop culture from top to bottom. We also encourage the team to look for ways to give back to the wider community and come to the business with ideas of how to support them. For example, our APAC Sales Director Peter Bray used to work for a company with strong ties to India and wanted to find a way to help contribute to COVID-19 relief efforts there. He created the Curry Club for COVID which helped raise over $12K with practical and financial support from the impact.com team.
I’m proud of the fact that because we put our people at the heart of everything we do, in recent years only three people have voluntarily left the APAC wide team, with one actually returning to the fold a year or so later because they missed us! We’ve got more than 60 people in our team across APAC so this speaks volumes about our tight knit, supportive and wonderful team.
Work-life balance at impact.com
Making sure that we walk the talk on this one is a core focus. First off, I’ve always trusted the team to be autonomous and take control of their work day in order to do their best work. This means blocking out time for exercise, lunch and dinner with friends and family. For some this means early starts, for others late evenings and for others both with a large break in the middle of the day. This flexibility is one of the reasons we were able to continue business as usual when COVID hit last year as we already had flexibility built into our DNA. We also encourage blocking out diary time for “deep work”, as well as encouraging ‘walking meetings’ to avoid overloading on Zoom calls. All of our employees have access to private health insurance through BUPA as well as an employee assistance and wellbeing program (LifeWorks) which provides counselling services and other wellbeing solutions.
impact.com has a global ‘unlimited leave’ policy so that our employees can take time out when they need it most and the company shuts down for two weeks over the Christmas period to ensure the team can fully recharge their batteries for the next calendar year. We are also incredibly proud of the fact we’ve just introduced 26 weeks of paid leave for new parents across the globe! Employees are also encouraged to take time out to participate in charity work both inside and outside of work, for example the Sydney team recently worked with Oz Harvest to help pack hampers and recently partnered with industry charity UnLtd to create a four-week Stepathon challenge to help promote a healthier mindset.
As a company, we look closely at the feedback in our employee satisfaction surveys. After COVID hit, one of the consistent themes from feedback was that it was hard for people to really shut off and disconnect from work. As a direct result, we added three company-wide holidays per year so that our employees can enjoy a long weekend and downtime together globally – safe in the knowledge that they won’t have a high volume of internal emails to respond to on their return.
Having always prioritised our team’s mental health, we’ve doubled down on efforts over the last 18 months, with some of our senior team qualifying as mental health first aiders via UnLtd’s Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training course and have scheduled things like special zoom classes on strategies to cope with home-schooling, building mental resilience, managing your energy and so forth.
Finally, as our work hard, play hard ethos has had to adapt to COVID, we’ve also swapped out group lunches, exercise and charity activity for regular remote surprises and activities that can either be undertaken as a virtual group or individually – most recently a ‘pimp your pancakes’ challenge after mailing out a kit from Pepe Saya, a pottery masterclass with Crockd and a virtual terrarium making workshop with Little Succers.
Working at impact.com
We are collaborative, entrepreneurial and strive for excellence in everything we do. I try my hardest to make sure that every voice in the company is heard and have a long standing ‘hour of impact’ blocked out in my diary every Friday morning to chat with anyone from inside (or outside) the company who reaches out to me – either for an informal conversation or to get some career advice.
Since COVID, we also launched a regular internal podcast called The Impact Hotseat where we interview a team member to get to know them better – this is particularly valuable for those team members who have come on board since remote working was introduced last year.
Company values
Yes, our global company values are:
- Customer obsessed
- Hustle
- Passion
- Humility (in APAC)
We host “Value Awards” in APAC twice a year to vote on which team member has best embodied these the most and present them with a gift card to spend on anything that makes them happy.