What actually makes a best place to work: three companies on what worked, what flopped

Plenty of companies will tell you they're a great place to work. Far fewer will tell you what it actually took, including the bits that didn't work.

So we got three of them in a room to do exactly that. Huggg, Octopus Energy and Stowe Family Law all made the Sunday Times Best Places to Work list this year. Between them they cover 25 people, 400 people and more than 10,000. Here's what actually built the culture, what flopped, and what they'd change.

Watch the full session on YouTube.

Quick answer: Nobody bought their way onto the list. Across all three companies, the things that mattered were free or close to it: peer-to-peer recognition, genuine community, fast decisions, and leaders who listen. Culture is the bedrock, and there's no vendor on the planet who can sell you one.

Culture is the bedrock, not a product you buy

The through-line of the whole conversation, from Huggg CEO Paul Wickers: "There's no vendor on the planet we can send you to that will fix that."

None of the three got on the list by buying one product or running one initiative. It was a long string of things over a long period, sitting on top of the culture underneath. Get the culture wrong and the rest is decoration.

It's worth saying because it's the opposite of how most "best place to work" advice reads. Nobody on the call said "we bumped everyone's salary 5%" or "we put in a perks platform." When we asked what landed best with their teams, not one answer was something they'd paid a vendor for.

That's the good news, really. The stuff that works is mostly free. It just takes effort and attention, which are harder to fake than budget.

Growth is the biggest threat to culture

If there's one warning worth pinning up, it's this one from Emily Hall at Octopus Energy: the danger point isn't size, it's the rate you dilute the people who carry the culture.

"To go from 12 to 25 - that's huge," she said. "You could argue it's easier to grow from a thousand to 1,100. The number's higher, but 100 people aren't going to touch a thousand OGs. Whereas to double your headcount, and have double the people come in who may not be as aligned, as passionate, as dedicated to the culture - that's where the risk is."

Octopus has scaled past 10,000 people globally and fiercely protected its culture through it. Emily's point is that they mostly didn't have to fight for it, because people join for the mission and the culture in the first place. But they're clear-eyed about where it can break: when new joiners start to outnumber the people who've lived it.

Paul's version of the same idea: the further someone sits from the founders and the people setting the culture, the more they detach from the context of the company, and the worse it gets. The fix isn't a policy. It's getting people as close as possible to the "nuclei" who carry the energy.

How do you keep people empowered at 10,000 staff?

This is where it got tactical. In most big organisations you can't do anything without 25 layers of sign-off, and someone in one of those layers saying no. So how does Octopus actually move fast?

Emily's principle: faster is safer. "Learning to ride a bike slowly on the grass is really hard - you fall off all the time. On the tarmac, at speed, it's technically scarier, but it's actually safer."

The concrete example: Octopus had built its low-carbon business (heat pumps, solar, EV chargers) with separate specialist teams, which was unlike them. Last year they needed to merge those back into single hyper-skilled teams, so a customer electrifying their home could talk to one person about all of it. That's a change touching thousands of people, including field teams.

Here's how they did it in under six months:

• Start small. One team - the south team - hyper-skilled first, with a really tight feedback loop.
• Keep the loop fluid. This works, this doesn't, here's the top tip. Build community through the learning and the discomfort.
• Let peers spread it. Once that first group could do it, they told everyone else. Engineers, electricians and salespeople who'd been through it themselves became the endorsement.

"You're more likely to believe your mate who sits next to you than a senior leader," Emily said, "because that person does your job. It's just human nature."

Two blockers worth removing while you're at it: let people who do the same role in completely different regions talk to each other (they usually can't), and don't let a divide open up between office and field-based teams. Octopus rounds up desk-based comms into an email digest for field teams who are in customers' homes all day, so nobody's excluded - and pushes customer stories back the other way so the engineer in the home knows what the office promised.

A neat bonus tip from Paul for anyone drowning in Slack: it's now genuinely straightforward to set up a daily AI workflow that digests a set of channels, writes a summary and posts it to another channel. You don't need to be technical to do it.

What are the warning signs a culture is slipping?

We asked all three what the early tells are. Their answers are a decent diagnostic checklist:

• Feedback dries up. Emily's biggest red flag: "When people stop giving you feedback - response rate, participation drops - that means they don't feel psychologically safe, or don't feel like they can speak up."
• Decisions slow down, and nobody owns anything. Slanty shoulders, the blame game, "that's not my job." At Octopus the only acceptable version of that is "I literally can't do finance." Everything else, you help.
• The quiet stuff. Alice Cox at Huggg flagged the odd comment on a group call that's "clearly stemming from somewhere." Not everyone will come and tell you. Some people just quietly stew, and remotely that's even harder to catch.
• Workload creep. Stowe's Louise Shepherd runs regular pulse check-ins and acts fast - when it was clear their lawyers were struggling with workload, they stepped in quickly to take things off their plates. Listening and reacting is how they spot it now.

And one hiring rule from Paul that stuck with everyone: don't hire the fun sponge. "It doesn't matter how amazing or talented they are. If they're not going to be nice to be around, it just dents the atmosphere for everyone else."

He also made a case against a phrase a lot of companies love: don't call yourselves a family. "When you're a family, you basically excuse everybody's failings - you're the backstop for everything they do wrong. A sports team is a better analogy. Really performant, all pointed the same direction, and it can still feel familiar."

The initiatives that actually landed

Nobody named a product. They named feelings and flexibility.

Huggg - work abroad. Alice's pick: team members can temporarily work abroad, minding time zones and tax rules. Over half the team uses it, whether to see family in another country or explore somewhere for longer than annual leave allows. "I'd argue they'd rather have this than a salary bump. You can't really swap it out for monetary value."

Stowe - a range, not a silver bullet. Louise's honest answer was that there isn't one thing, because one thing never suits everyone. Some things flopped: paid volunteering leave and swapping bank holidays for other religious holidays were both underused at first, so they flexed volunteering into hours rather than whole days. What lands consistently is small and in-the-moment recognition. Stowe gives managers their own Huggg pots to send instant thank-yous. "The amount of times I get 'can you top up my Huggg pot please, Lou'. Just a little something to say I see you, I hear you."

Octopus - community for its own sake. Emily's is the one worth stealing. "People feel more disconnected than ever. Creating community that's genuine and just for fun is where the magic happens." Their "Jumping into January" runs every year - anyone across Octopus joins, and it's not just fitness. Couch to 5k, dry January, quitting smoking, whatever. It's team-built, self-driving and needs almost no intervention. "It's how you create a water-cooler feeling when you're remote."

That water-cooler idea came up again and again. Stowe's intranet has a pets channel and a crafts channel alongside the policies. Huggg runs in-person "group hugs" every other month with a social activity that isn't just the pub, so it's inclusive for people who don't drink. Different scales, same instinct: give people a place to connect over something that isn't work.

Paul's framing of why this matters commercially: people find it very easy to leave a bad boss or bad pay, and very hard to leave colleagues they love. "Connecting people to the people around them can be inexpensive or free, and it can be the most solid retention tissue you have."

If instant, in-the-moment recognition is the bit you want to make easier, that's exactly what employee recognition with Huggg is built for - a manager sends a gift as a link, the person chooses what they actually want, and there's nothing to log into.

Should culture change as you grow?

Yes, and trying to freeze it is its own mistake. Emily again: "The only thing that never changes is that change happens."

Her rule is to hold a small set of non-negotiables and let everything else flex. At Octopus that's three things: obsessed with customers, high freedom and responsibility, people-led leaders. Get those right and the rest can breathe.

She used the dry stone wall as the metaphor. It's built from stones of all different shapes and sizes, and it's strong and hardy precisely because of that. The Coventry office feels different to Brighton, which feels different to Manchester - different vibe, same expectations on customer, etiquette and kindness. "The danger of everyone having to be the same is you build a wall of identical bricks, and that kills it too."

What we'd tell every leader

We closed by asking each of them for one thing, in a sentence.

• Louise: listen to your people.
• Alice: community costs nothing - a World Cup sweepstake, a shared-interest channel - but never force it. Forced fun isn't fun.
• Emily: a leader not prioritising culture loses everything. Great culture makes the business smoother, slicker, more profitable and more productive. Whatever your goal is, this is the answer.

Or, as Paul put it to wrap up: look after your teams, they'll look after your customers, and your customers look after everything else. It's almost never a thing you buy. It's the effort, the time, and protecting it at all costs.

Huggg is free to use and you only pay for the gifts you send, with hundreds of gifts your team can choose from and nothing for recipients to log into. It's how over 2,000 UK businesses handle the small, in-the-moment recognition that keeps people feeling seen.

See how Huggg works, or start gifting today.