Great place to work certified!
It’s official, The Experience Design Studio is a Great Place to Work®-Certified company! We take company culture pretty seriously here at XDS, so the Great Place to Work Certification is a badge of honor that we will bear proudly. It validates the employee experience we’ve worked hard to create for our team and the great workplace culture we strive to build every day. We pride ourselves on providing a healthy and happy environment where employees are appreciated, acknowledged, and respected.
Building a team and maintaining the sense of community it takes to be a Great Place to Work® has been a challenge during the pandemic. With everything happening online, offices being closed and most of our staff working remotely, we had to get creative to keep our team connected. First and foremost, we encourage everyone to pick up the phone or do a video chat to brainstorm and hash out projects. Face-to-face time with colleagues is essential to promoting healthy work relationships. While communication via gifs is a way of life here, we don’t want everyone working on autopilot and slacking messages back and forth without having real conversations. From virtual design show and tell meetings to our monthly all-hands calls and dad joke Fridays, we try to keep everyone engaged and infuse some fun into our days. The team also bonds on our exclusive slack channels like xds-fun-pets and xds-watercooler where we share our favorite pet pics, memes, and have “donut dates.” Last but not least, every Tuesday is DoorDash day where all of our employees get to order a meal of their choice on us and we chat over Teams while we enjoy our lunch.
A few other key initiatives that XDS provides to keep our team happy and productive are a strict no nights and weekend policy, an employee referral fee, and a home office stipend. We also offer health and 401k benefits, performance-based annual raises and bonuses, holiday time off, personal days, and flexibility to work remotely when needed. Each employee also gets a Mac laptop and additional equipment if needed. Most importantly, we want everyone to love what they do and love where they work. We want a cohesive, functional team that is proud to call themselves XDSers.
So what did our employees say on the Great Places To Work Survey?
100% of employees at The Experience Design Studio say it is a great place to work compared to 59% of employees at a typical U.S.-based company.
100% I can ask management any reasonable question and get a straight answer.
100% Management is approachable, easy to talk with.
100% Management is competent at running the business.
100% Management hires people who fit in well here.
100% Management trusts people to do a good job without watching over their shoulders.
What makes The Experience Design Studio a great workplace? These words are drawn from employee comments on the Trust Index™ survey.
