Tech Nation 
2 min read
One of our cohort companies, OLIO, founded by Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One, started remote-first from the get-go. Read her Medium blog post to find out more and learn from their experience.
Here’s Tessa on how being remote-first has helped increase diversity within her team:
“Being able to recruit outside of the core cities and offering a fully flexible and autonomous way of working – means that we’re able to attract a far more diverse type of candidate. For example, women (and increasingly men) looking for a career that fits with family life; plus neuro-diverse team members who wouldn’t thrive in a classic corporate office, but are some of our very best performers.”
Edinburgh
Outside of their jobs, many workers are responsible for providing care in their daily lives. The sheer demands of this requirement can ultimately force many to give up their employment entirely.
Edinburgh-based firm Matter of Focus believes in making work as inclusive as possible. They particularly wanted to improve working for those who also have caring responsibilities in their day-to-day lives.
“We implemented very flexible working hours and we allow our people to arrange their job around their caring responsibilities. As a result, we have some amazing staff who wouldn’t be working for us if they couldn’t also accommodate their caring responsibilities. Our workforce is subsequently more diverse, with great gender balance.”
Oxford
Vitaccess Ltd are helping employees maintain a healthy work-life balance. As well as providing more flexible working conditions, they have also invested directly in employee wellbeing to create a greater framework of support, including for those who might have additional responsibilities at home, such as care provision or academic commitments.
The company also employs two trained mental health first-aiders, who hold regular group wellness calls with employees, as well as giving staff members the opportunity to embed flexible working into their contracts.
This helps people balance work with taking care of families or part-time study. Today, the team is 67% female, and company wellbeing remains resilient, despite the Covid-19 pandemic.
“In our most recent company survey, employees rated their wellbeing and work-life balance in 2020 at 4.2/5, only a slight drop from the 2019 score. We feel we did remarkably well to maintain that level of score in the current climate.”
