Q&A with 2023 Best Place to Work award winner, Full Circle Research
Editor’s note: Full Circle Research is the winner of the 2023 Best Place to Work Award, a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. The award winners were announced during a virtual celebration on November 14, 2023. To learn more about the awards go to https://www.quirksawards.com/
Full Circle Research is an award-winning online sample provider with proven highest-quality sample, service and culture. As of November 14, 2023, Full Circle Research is also the winner of the Best Place to Work Award.
Since day one, leadership at Full Circle has prioritized cultivating a collaborative, progressive environment to ensure every team member thrives, personally and professionally.
Unlimited vacation, generous health policies, 401k-matching and an industry-leading parental leave program take care of their employees after-hours. These and their initiatives run during the workday result in a 99+% employee satisfaction rate.
Christina Cox, director of HR, Full Circle Research, explained that they created these initiatives not only for their team but also with the hope that they become a standard in the industry.
“We invest significant resources into our employee benefits package. We do so to delight our team, but also to inspire other organizations to consider the important role culture plays in retention, productivity and revenue growth,” Cox said. “Every employee in the market research and insights space deserves to feel valued and enjoy their work. It is our hope that, one day, this becomes the industry standard!”
Cox explained their award-winning employee programs in a Q&A with Quirk’s Media.
What changes have made the most impact on your company culture?
We evaluate our programming annually to ensure that we’re meeting our team’s needs as they evolve.
For 2023, we standardized our calendar of offerings to build excitement and create lasting engagement. We also shifted to favoring quality over quantity, choosing to pay a premium for high-caliber hosts to lead us in professional development, wellness activities and DEI training.
Why do you think it’s important for your company to have the initiatives it has both during the workday and after hours?
We are a people-centric company, and we know that a holistic approach to benefits results in happier, more fulfilled, engaged and validated employees.
We believe fun and enjoyment shouldn’t end when you “walk through the work door” – it should continue! Our after-hours initiatives allow employees to live their lives in line with what is important to them outside of work (via unlimited vacation, fair pay, flex-work schedule, etc.); our workday programming satisfies those same values when our team is together.
How do you make sure you are meeting your employees' needs with the various initiatives you provide?
Feedback, feedback and more feedback! We never pretend to know exactly what employees want; we ask, and we ask often. When an initiative doesn’t resonate as intended, we pivot, transform, recreate or simply just scrap it.
We’re not afraid to fail, or tweak ideas, because the end result is often a tailored offering that better meets our team members’ needs. We also keep a vigilant eye on benefit trends to see what is becoming important or obsolete.