We believe that investing in employee development is an investment in the development of the entire organisation.

Our ambition is that all our people have access to high-quality, relevant development opportunities. We have a number of globally consistent development programmes that cover the entire organisation. 

We have partnered with global experts, like LinkedIn Learning and Harvard Business School to provide genuinely best-in-class development materials & experiences for our people. As well as curricula-based development programmes, we also have our Global Leaders Connect programme to develop up-and-coming talent and our new annual IPF Learning Festival, where the entire organisation joins together for a week of focussed development.

Whichever role you join us in, we offer training to help you settle into your new role when you first join us. After that, your manager will work with you to set personal goals and kickstart your development journey.

Our people are based across three different continents with many hub teams having people in multiple countries. This means we work especially hard on how we communicate and interact with people. People who are not interacting directly with customers have autonomy and empowerment to work in a way that best suits their role and the people they have to interact with. 

We have hybrid working in place and flexible working schedules that can meet the needs of the role and the individual. Although we have learnt to build strong and close relationships working remotely we also place a lot of importance on in person interaction. 

We have offices in all of our locations and encourage people to attend a couple of times a week in order to build relationships, connect with others and to use in person meetings when dealing with topics that require creative solutions. 

We also put a lot of effort into having an annual in person global conference so that our people can get the opportunity to meet and connect physically with people from other geographical locations that they will work with in most cases every day. These events are legendary.

The people and culture of our business is one of the things we love about IPF Digital. In order to maintain our culture we place a lot of importance on selecting the right people to join our team. In addition to technical assessments and interviews for all people who join our team we also hold a ‘no skin in the game’ meeting. This is where we invite potential new joiners to a meeting with someone from another part of the business who is relatively independent from the team or business area we are recruiting into. These people are experts in our culture, values and purpose and they will do an assessment of an individuals fit for our team and culture. The saying, ‘Team work makes the dream work’ is a perfect fit for our business.

We place huge importance on ensuring that our people are safe, connected and feel a true sense of wellbeing, both because it is the right thing to do but also our ability to serve our customers well relies on having highly engaged and skilled colleagues who adhere to our values and ethics. CARE is how we describe our approach towards our people, and it sits at the heart of our culture.

Our Global Care approach was introduced in early 2020 to support our leaders to focus on IPF Group business priorities, whilst demonstrating clear, visible support and care for our people. We extended its scope to ensure that, despite sometimes being physically distanced, we maintained the same levels of engagement and collaboration that we have always enjoyed. Maintaining these critical aspects of our culture has undoubtedly helped us to regrow the business. This was also borne out by the findings of our Global People Survey, where we experienced a very high response rate and strong positive feedback – which demonstrates that our teams are invested and passionate about their work.

Dynamic in nature, the areas of focus for CARE are:

• Personal Care for our people
• Care Heroes & sharing stories
• Excellent communication
• Ensuring that our managers have all the resources that they need to lead.

A global, cross-functional CARE working group consisting of representatives from across the business working in functions such as HR, Communications, Corporate Affairs and Safety regularly meet to share best practice around care, ensure a global focus and thread of activities, design, plan and deliver global CARE initiatives and evaluate and assess deliverables.

Some of the initiatives delivered include:

• Continually reviewing and improving our approach towards physical and psychosocial safety
• Shifted our ways of working, moving from predominantly office-based working for head office functions to remote and then hybrid models
• Hosting a series of virtual events, including a Global Togetherness Day encouraging people to engage and connect with one another.