At Applover, we place great importance on the personal development and well-being of our employees. We’re well aware that our tech experts are self-educated in many fields. And we praise them for that! We highly appreciate all kinds of bottom-up initiatives and efforts to achieve their goals when it comes to the internal evaluation process. However, this doesn’t change that whenever we have the opportunity, we’re trying to support our people at Applover in an expansion of skills and developments in many fields.

Mental growth and health are directly connected to physical condition. As a result, we make sure that everyone feels cared for in this aspect as well. We’re glad that private medical care has become a standard in most organizations employing people. We can’t imagine that something like this wouldn’t be available at Applover 🙂 

Every person matters a lot in our digital agency and these are not just empty words.  We care a lot about making people aware that they are important. That we appreciate them, and that we also appreciate their efforts in acquiring new knowledge. 

Recognizing this investment in employees always pays off because a good team spirit results in good functioning of the whole company – we do our best to make our team feel we support them in achieving their goals and self-development. How does this happen? The best way to illustrate this is with a few examples of our benefits that are directly related to employee self-development and well-being.

1. Education fund

Given that the IT world is changing at a rapid pace and that new technology, as well as innovative solutions, appear regularly, we try to support our developers in a way that helps them to participate in this process of change. If someone wants to go for a course that will allow gaining new knowledge – that person can apply for funding for such an activity. We realize that the courses related to the IT industry are very expensive and we don’t want our developers’ wallets to suffer because of that. Quite the contrary.

This is directly related to one of our company’s values, “Engagement”. We actively observe that people at Applover engage themselves in various activities and if we have such an opportunity – we are going to support it as much as we can!

2. English lessons

It would seem that knowing English is something you take for granted. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get to know it even better and speak it more fluently! We have the pleasure of working with an excellent English teacher – Karolina Budzisz-Myszczyńska. Karolina is great and her lessons are never boring. Our employees especially admire the way the classes are managed, which is unconventional and allows the participant to acquire new knowledge enjoyably. 

3. Team’s budget

Knowledge alone is not enough. Applover team is a group of people who simply like each other a lot and are happy to spend time together. The idea of integration budgets was born in our heads some time ago. We are becoming a bigger company and we have ambitious plans to grow even higher, so we’ve taken advantage of the insight that teams often organize various types of hangouts for beer, kayaking, or bowling. We decided that it would be nice to support such initiatives and contribute to them. There is a specific amount of money per month for each of our team members and our only condition is that the majority of them have to take part in the integration

In practice, we’ve found that our teams are increasingly choosing to take Gallup’s talent test in addition to bowling or go-karting, which is great for improving the communication within the team. Another way of using this type of funding is ordering food from Takeway.com during education sessions (we call it “edu sessions”) about which you will learn more later in this article. In a word, there are plenty of ways to use this budget and we are pleased that our employees are so enthusiastic to use it.

4. Books budget

Each of us has a monthly budget for buying books/eBooks, which by definition are supposed to support our growth both at work and personal development. Sylwia Kustrzycka, our Office Manager, orders different types of books every month which many of us are waiting for impatiently. Sometimes it happens that people in departments agree who orders what book and they exchange them among themselves. In this way, we create our own library that we use with pleasure 🙂

5. Edu meetings

This is our next idea for spreading knowledge among people in our company. The educational sessions are usually held every week or two and are organized in each of our departments. During such an edu session, meeting participants have the opportunity to share knowledge. These types of meetings can be organized by anyone in the department. If you have an idea for a meeting and would like to share something interesting with others – just let us know! We will be happy to help you organize such a session. This is another thing that directly ties into our values and personal development. 

6. Personal Growth Framework

Here we would like to talk a little more about each of our employees’ impact on the company. We try persistently to make sure that everyone can share their opinion and feedback. We constantly collect different kinds of feedback and improvement ideas for many processes directly from our employees and whenever we can we’re trying to put it into practice. 

In terms of influence, this also comes together with the opportunity to choose the personal development paths that are presented in our PGF’s. When we welcome a new person to the department, there’s a meeting with a leader who tells what self-improvement opportunities can be offered and in which direction this person would like to go. It covers the things that they are more interested in. Such 1:1 meetings with the leaders are crucial for us because apart from the integration, the new employee has the opportunity to see and learn even more about the scope of activities in the given position, and the leader has the opportunity to help in career development. You can explore this topic further in our article on Personal Growth Framework at Applover – how we take care of our team members’ development.

The importance of benefits at Applover

The personal development of our employees and their well-being is extremely important to us. We continue to use their feedback to improve our procedures and communication, as well as talk to them about what they want to do next, and we listen. All the time we make every effort to make them feel good in our company. 🙂