One of the key things we believe in at Tyk is giving our employees the agency to prioritise their work life around their ‘life-life’.
The approach we take is that by giving folks radical flexibility and autonomy, we’ll get the best out of them – and it works! Our customer-facing teams work remotely and flexibly, which is the opposite of most customer-facing organisations.
Our employee success team is integral to our customer success in this regard, owning several initiatives that inspire our employees while being the guardians of the culture we’ve built at Tyk.
Remote Work
We work 100% remotely at Tyk.
We don’t half-ass remote work or subscribe to a hybrid model. Tyk is 100 percent wholly distributed with team members in 30 countries worldwide. Asynchronous communication is our priority to ensure you have a voice no matter where you are.
It’s a delicate balance to strike, but we do it well, and our customer-facing teams work remotely from wherever they want – we have folks from Atlanta to Lagos, from Singapore to Ontario.
Take me (Chris, VP of Customer Ops) as a key example; this year, I’ve worked from 15 different countries, constantly travelling. I’ve been working asynchronously, building teams and managing projects – I also got promoted earlier this year.
Remote work isn’t a limiter to customer success; it enables it. Because of the flexibility we give our teams, they repay our customers in kind. Take customer support; on average, we deliver 99 percent customer satisfaction and SLA compliance – from a team that works remotely.
Flexible Schedules
Everyone at Tyk chooses when they want to work.
As a customer-facing leader, the prospect of that can be scary – I get it; I managed call centres in the past where this approach wouldn’t work. However, in technology and especially business-to-business, it’s easy to operate and be successful with this approach.
We have coverage in every timezone to ensure there’s someone around and a leader in each timezone aware of incoming customer issues. But fundamentally, we’ve never had to set a rota or mandate any shifts in customer operations. How many customer organisations can say that?
Through this way of working, fostering accountability is extremely important – and this is where employee success guides us – giving managers and leaders all the tools they need to ensure we are performing well while maintaining the flexible culture we have in place.
Unlimited Annual Leave
Every member of the Tyk team gets unlimited annual leave – again, something antithetical to how a traditional customer-facing environment works.
As managers, we review annual leave requests to ensure we have enough team cover so our customers always have someone to support them.
Many people are naturally sceptical about unlimited leave policies because of the horror stories from folks who have joined companies with this policy and have it mean you get no time off.
We’re not like that at Tyk. Employee Success mandates a minimum of 25 days off per year or more if the statutory minimum is higher, and as a management team, we have to ensure our team adheres to that at least.
Wellbeing
We take our employees’ wellbeing very seriously at Tyk and are constantly working on new initiatives to make them feel as comfortable as possible.
Here are some of the benefits we currently offer:
- Unlimited paid time off for annual leave or if employees need a bit of downtime
- Occupational health support for when Tyklings need that extra support
- Wellbeing days off throughout the year
- Lifeworks – a global EAP system which offers remote support to our employees across the globe on mental health, financial and physical wellbeing and counselling sessions.
Performance Reviews
We have a robust performance review process at Tyk, which takes place twice a year, alongside regular 121s with line managers.
It’s an opportunity for the team to bring up any issues and have meaningful career discussions with their direct manager and has a real focus on individual career progression and individuals’ development.
We talk about performance all the time, so reviews should differ from a place you visit twice a year to hearing something new. We have an open feedback culture, and folks know how they perform through regular discussions with their manager.
It’s a neat way to ensure folks are meeting their goals and growing in their careers as they want to. This enables our customer success by providing a team that is upskilled in the latest technologies and collectively meeting our business goals for our clients.
Employee success recently overhauled the entire performance review process to focus on our culture and how we work significantly. Everything from working setup to how you prefer to communicate is covered alongside career development – to ensure our remote-first work environment is inclusive.
Learning and Development
Learning and development opportunities are open to all staff at Tyk who can submit a request to Employee Success to learn anything that might help them in their role.
We’ve got a training partner who comes in and gives regular training sessions to the team on collaboration and remote working and provides tools and processes to enable our success.
We also recently tried Ultimate Contribution, a career and life coaching framework you work through with an expert coach over eight weeks. This has proven effective for the trial employees, and we’re looking to roll it out to the broader business soon.
We have a management programme which an external training partner delivers. This programme is geared explicitly towards remote management and leadership; it gives us all a shared language and context to operate from, building further alignment in the organisation.
These initiatives ensure that employees have access to the learning and development tools and courses they need to succeed in the long term. For our customers, it means they have access to customer-facing engineers who are up-skilled to a high level in the technologies they’re working with day to day, like MongoDB, Kubernetes and Openshift.
The Tyk way
It’s fantastic to work with an employee success team so committed to maintaining the positive remote culture we have built. We have a bunch of ongoing initiatives to ensure as we scale, we remain remote-first and asynchronous and continue to up-skill our team in a thoughtful way.
At Tyk, employee success enables our customer success because a happy team leads to happy and satisfied customers. You can read more about how we work here.
