As you may know, here at Ultimate, our ethos is ‘Enjoy Life. Do Great Work’. Lots of companies have motivational quotes to inspire their employees- but here at Ultimate, we try to live by ours in everything we do as a company. We think this ethos, ‘Enjoy Life. Do Great Work’ is fundamental to who we are as a company, including the wellbeing and happiness of each and every person who works here.
To make sure that this ethos didn’t become just another strapline, each year Ultimate create a new rewards scheme to boost engagement and productivity within the company. A design is created and exhibited in the office, with individual goals for each department outlined in a framework that ties all of our achievements together, in line with our company values. Each department (Sales, Account Management, Digital Marketing, Development and Design) have individual team goals set to achieve in order to gain company rewards. These rewards can be anything from gift vouchers to holiday days (as you might imagine, we think it’s a pretty great system).
The goals are carefully chosen in order to achieve the best positive outcome for the business and for each individual team member. To ensure everyone is improving together, the system is all about teamwork. This year, our company rewards scheme is called “The Ultiverse’’, replacing our previous concept, ‘Hive’, in 2018, which was all about bees working together to gather honey for their hive (we are pretty much Manchester, after all!)
Of course, the concept of businesses having team objectives or even reward schemes or incentives is not a new idea - but Ultimate has chosen to focus on collaboration and teamwork above all else. Each of our targets requires teamwork to complete, and no target is a goal just for one individual to achieve. In addition, the majority of the targets require collaboration between different departments.
For instance, creating blog content for the Ultimate website is a Design objective, but requires the support of Digital Marketing to achieve. This promotes not only departmental collaboration but collaboration between different teams, as we all work together to achieve the targets. Our rewards system, which ranges from lunches to days out to extra holiday days, is applied company-wide when one team achieves something! So rather than rewarding one team when we achieve something, the whole team is rewarded, because it couldn’t be done without everyone.
Every year the rewards scheme revolves around our company ethos to be the best, not the biggest.
The Ultiverse concept:
As you might have figured out by now, ‘Ultiverse’ is a blend word made up from Ultimate and Universe! All the planets in the universe need to work together, in order to keep the solar system in balance. At Ultimate, we extrapolated this to meet our company values, with everyone working together to achieve an overall goal. Each department team within Ultimate has been designated with a planet per team, and each team/planet orbits the sun (which on our design is Ultimate - of course). The main goal, with the Ultiverse, is to encourage the whole company to be a part of something bigger! As part of the ‘Ultiverse’ goals, our company values run alongside each goal. Ultimate have 5 company values, which are: creative and inspiring, passion and dedication, celebrate success, continuous improvement and support and respect.
In order for the company to have complete awareness of how each team and company are achieving, we wanted to make the ‘Ultiverse’ an interactive wall. Our design team created stickers to highlight each goal once completed. Once a goal has been achieved, it is announced to the whole company by everyone getting together and seeing the sticker being attached to the wall.
This year alone, the team have achieved lots of significant achievements and company milestones, including holding Branding Workshops to fulfil the company ethos of dedication, passion, and continual improvement, Design have contributed two blogs per person to our Ultimate blog (like this one!) and we’ve been on a number of educational courses to deepen and broaden our knowledge of our sector.
Pop in and take a look at our Ultiverse! See for yourself how it encourages Ultimate to work together (and perhaps even create a motivational company program of your own!).
