Have a serious think about whether this is the right place for you - Consultant Newton Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. I’m very sorry to hear that you felt this uncomfortable in Newton and that we weren’t able to resolve this while you were with us. Newton’s culture of fun and friendship combined with exceptional performance is special, but we acknowledge it doesn’t suit everyone. We try to create an inclusive environment for everyone and do recognise that inclusion requires ongoing effort from all of us at Newton. From a recruitment perspective, we’ve been working hard to attract a more diverse group of people to Newton, including scrutinising our processes from beginning to end to challenge and remove opportunities for unconscious bias or to recruit ‘what we know’, but we’re aware that a focus on recruitment alone is only part of the picture. As a company and as individuals we’re learning all the time about how our actions play their part, and we’re having a very live conversation about this across our company, facilitated by our internal EDI group and championed by our leaders, so we genuinely welcome the feedback. We do not want our company to look, or be, predominantly white and male. Our graduate intake this year has been 40% women. We’ve spent the last month hearing more from colleagues in the LGBTQ+ community and discussing together the importance of creating a safe space for everyone to feel able to be themselves. We continue to face into the challenge of becoming a more ethnically diverse workforce, and would like to get there faster. Our feedback culture is meant to be helpful, reciprocal, and to drive quick progression so that we can keep developing. We encourage conversations between line managers and their teams, and development managers and their developees about how feedback can and should be shared with each person. Everyone has preferences in how they receive feedback on their development areas, some wanting regular reminders while others prefer one chat and then to reflect for themselves. From your experience it sounds as though there were times when the way feedback was delivered to you wasn’t constructive. We do work in intense situations due, in part, to the results guarantee we give to our clients with the focus on delivering measurable results, so we know our teams deal with a lot of pressure. We monitor general wellbeing across the company every fortnight through our employee survey and, while some people thrive in this environment and find the support we offer effective, it doesn’t work for everyone and, here again, we’re always looking for ways to improve. Ensuring everyone has a development manager, providing company review days once a fortnight, and creating forums for colleagues to support each other are some of the ways we offer safe space and support. We’ve also been analysing line management practices across Newton so we can identify areas to support and further develop managers, as we know that these relationships are important to both the delivery of our projects and the wellbeing of our people. Additionally, we’re currently trialling some training in mental health first aid so that we’re better able to spot the signs of where somebody may be feeling so overwhelmed that it’s impacting their mental health. We see this as a last resort, as our peer networks, development managers, line managers, HR support and other forums should enable us to have much earlier conversations about and with anyone who needs some extra help or, importantly, where we need to approach a situation differently. As a final point, where behaviour is deemed unacceptable or poor we will always deal with it by following the appropriate HR procedures. We do understand that Newton is a stretching environment. Our value of loving our people is of the utmost importance to us, so if you have any more feedback about your experience that you’d like to share we’d welcome an open conversation. Please get in touch with us at hrshared@newtoneurope.com.