Ultraleap’s staff turnover rate is just 4%, compared with a UK average of 15%.

We also won Tech Spark’s 2018 Best Place to Work in Tech award. Abby Brown and Victoria Purdon, HR Assistant and Office/Purchasing Manager at Ultraleap, talk about some of the reasons why this is. 

Last Wednesday we sat around a table with about 15 of our colleagues for Ultraleap’ monthly “pot luck” lunch. Every month we pick a different cuisine (this time it was curry), and whoever wants to join in can bring in dishes to share around one of the communal tables in our kitchen.

Pot luck lunch club is part of the Wellness Wednesdays project we run at Ultraleap HQ in Bristol. It’s an initiative designed to put the mental and physical wellbeing of employees at the heart of Ultraleap.

If you were an Ultraleap employee over the last few months you could have attended a mindfulness workshop or an alcohol awareness talk, taken part in the Wesport active challenge, joined our lunchtime walk club, or done the Time to Talk quiz for destigmatizing mental health.

You could have come to a bake sale or a charity cinema night to raise money for one of the charities we voted to support this year (Bristol Mind, Medecins Sans Frontieres and Brain Tumour Research). Last year we raised over £5000. This year we’re also hoping to raise £10,000 to support research into Parkinson’s through a 16-mile company organised walk.

Or you could have just eaten your lunch around one of our communal tables. We have a policy that no one – no matter how senior – is allowed to eat at their desk, which means that on any given day you could be eating your lunch next to a research engineer, a product manager or even one of the founders or the CEO.

People at Ultraleap are passionate about their jobs and they work hard, but we do this as part of a balanced lifestyle. And if you work in Ultraleap HQ in Bristol, when you leave work you’re walking out into a dynamic, creative city described as the best place to live in the UK (by the Sunday Times and Rough Guides).

It’s also the UK’s only fast growing, globally significant tech cluster: the largest robotics lab in Europe, the largest aerospace cluster in Europe, the European HQ for VR development and a UK testbed for 5G and autonomous systems are all here.

We know that the Wellness Wednesdays project, and other initiatives, are really effective and embedded in our company culture because new joiners say things such as, “Employee happiness seems to be high up the priority list for the Exec team,” or that we “really look after staff.”

If you’re interested in discovering the Ultraleap culture for yourself, check out our current vacancies.

Victoria Purdon and Abigail Brown run Ultraleap’s employee wellbeing program and are passionate advocates for the importance of work-life balance, healthy eating, mental health and exercise.