Milestone takes a systematic approach to developing our people and culture.
In 2023, we improved our operations and implemented new measures to streamline how we develop talent, leadership, and engagement.
Milestone has been growing rapidly the last couple of years and we have welcomed many new colleagues to our offices. We have close to 1,300 employees worldwide, and more than 70 nationalities represented in our workforce working from 25 countries around the world.
Our growth trajectory and current size present both challenges and opportunities. We need to transform our organization, revitalize our culture and align our operations around the world with our corporate strategy. In 2023, our focus has been on systematizing and professionalizing existing initiatives as well as implementing projects that support these initiatives.
These are some examples of our initiatives:
This project was initiated in 2022 and in 2023 we have implemented new measures to support the transformation process.
The objective of the project is to safeguard our People First organization and to adapt our workplace culture as we scale. We have strong values and a solid DNA, but as the world around us is changing, we also need to adapt our ways of working, internally and with our external stakeholders in a meaningful way.
To do so, in 2023, we have engaged our people to develop a new Behavior Model with five values defining the Milestone way of acting and relating to internal and external stakeholders. Four values - growth, empathy, passion, and empowerment – are retained values, but one new value – responsibility – has been added to cement our approach to technology and business development.
Once a year, managers and employees at Milestone are encouraged to summarize development conversations into Individual Development Plans (IDPs). The objective of these plans is to define what motivates and drives each individual and to discuss development opportunities that would be relevant to pursue.
The IDPs is also a tool to align individual goals with goals for our teams and departments and to secure that they support the goals of our corporate strategy. It makes us able to plan efforts for retention, job rotation, coaching, training, and learning initiatives, and it ensures that development conversations between employees and managers become an approachable and frequent event.
The IDPs also assists us in the yearly talent review at Milestone. This assessment identifies the employees who might be able to develop skills that would help us achieve our goals in the future. With this review we get a structured approach to talent development and managers are better equipped to support their employees in driving their career development. The talent review allows us look at how we can take advantage of the talent and opportunities that already exist in our organization.
The organization and salary reviews take place once a year. In this case we evaluate whether we are organized in the most effective way to tackle future business opportunities and whether our salaries are competitive in relation to industry benchmarks.
To make sure we are aware of employees’ well-being and opinions about their working environment and conditions, we carry out measurements.
Milestone has defined non-financial figures that we report consistently year after year, both internally and externally.
This year, we have improved our method for measuring employee satisfaction. We have developed Milestone Voice which gives us an up-to-date temperature check on our working environment and culture.
Our measurement of employee net promoter score (eNPS) is carried out more frequently and is communicated quarterly to all employees.
The eNPS is a metric used to measure employee engagement and loyalty towards a business. The score ranges from -100 to +100. Together with the engagement score (measured from 1 to 10) it gives us a valuable indicator of the temperature of our company.
In 2023, our employees gave Milestone an eNPS of 36 (34 in 2022) and an engagement score of 7.8 (7.9 in 2022). Both measurements have been done in November 2023, but are close to the average results of measurements carried out through the year. We consider this to be a satisfactory result.
Milestone’s eNPS is higher than the benchmark of 26 and the engagement score is matching the benchmark of 7.8. However, our ambitions go further, and we strive to increase these numbers by the measures we have initiated related to workplace and culture.