In June 2024 we held our first Life Size Annual General Meeting (AGM). It’s been just over three months since then and, crucially, we had our Life Size annual adventure in the meantime. We wanted to use this as a check-in point and an opportunity to move forwards on the more intangible aspects of our wishes for our business.
In this blog, I’d like to reflect on where we are at so our clients see how our employee ownership elevates how we work with them. This is also for anybody interested in what being employee-owned means and for the team that I love working with so much.
Why do we hold a Life Size AGM?
- To offer as many avenues for feedback and engagement as possible.
- For the team to meet the members of our board of trustees they don’t often meet.Â
- To live being employee-owned.Â
- It’s an occasion to remember that the destiny of our company is in our own hands. We may not feel or notice this every day but it’s at times of recruiting a new team member, deciding how to deal with difficult client situations and deciding how we grow the business that we can feel the difference.
From heartfelt wishes to business-critical activities
To begin translating our visionary and conceptual conversations at the AGM into actionable next steps, everybody had the opportunity to express a wish for the company going forwards.
- My wish is that responsibility really is shared because then I think it stays something that is light and manageable enough for everybody.
- My wish is for us to live employee ownership even more actively. I really enjoyed today’s conversations and questions. That spirit is the perfect example of how I want us to operate and translate that ownership into practice.
- My wish is to further elevate our brand and strengthen what we have, that we really understand it and feel 100% comfortable with it.
- My wish is that we continually grow in how confident we are with all aspects of climate tech and the challenges our clients face.Â
- My wish is for our client work, value work and commercial contribution to truly feel like complementary aspects of one and the same thing.
- My wish is that the company always keeps a really external person.
- My wish is to continually find new ways to live our values and incorporate them into our everyday work.
- My wish is that we establish an employee forum where employees can discuss ideas and concerns outside of day-to-day work.
- My wish is that we’re embracing employee ownership as a team where everyone takes on the responsibilities they feel comfortable taking on, growing individually while supporting everyone else at the same time.Â
- I wish for our company to remain a place where every employee feels valued, empowered and inspired.
Every session at the annual adventure contributed to making progress on these wishes. We decided on the next steps for each value team, experiencing several eureka moments that unlocked new ideas, we made decisions for our brand development and we explored further what shared responsibility means for our client work and business growth.
“I want us to enjoy the feeling of being part of something great.”Â
– Helene Lamprecht, Communications Manager at Life Size
Translating visionary concepts into achievable actions
As a business that wants to grow its impact by working with many transformative climate tech companies and that also sees a healthy work-life balance and a commitment to our values as non-negotiables, getting ever clearer on how to translate visionary concepts into achievable actions is crucial.
We constantly move between big visionary conversations and achievable actions we need to take in all aspects of our work.Â
- In our diversity and inclusion efforts, we address complex and multi-layered topics, like unconscious bias, as a team and identify volunteering opportunities with an immediately positive impact on the lives of others.Â
- In our sustainability efforts, we continually seek better, more direct and meaningful ways to have an impact through volunteering locally and directly donating a percentage of our profits to causes that are transformative.Â
- And the work-life balance team has evaluated numerous possibilities to find measures that benefit each individual in a multinational company instead of blanket policies that sound nice in theory but don’t support everyone’s individual needs.
- Every team member contributes to our business growth. Translating our profit and growth goals into clear and achievable individual actions is one of our tasks for the near future.
- In our work with climate tech companies, we employ the available palette of communications services, but we don’t apply a blanket treatment ever. We seek the tailored, well-timed and correctly resourced programme that will best deliver on our clients’ traction.
It’s very hard to keep moving between the big vision and the specific action that will get you there step by step. It’s what we, at Life Size, excel at and something to cultivate further in all our work. For me, this realisation and homing in on our value proposition is the most important result of our AGM and annual adventure.
If you would like to explore working with a value-driven team of climate tech communications experts, get in touch. We’d love for our qualities and expertise to contribute to your success.