YLD is a software consultancy and training company that helps businesses achieve the transformation they need to stay relevant in their markets and grow whilst saving costs and improving productivity. With offices in London and Lisbon, YLD values their employees and offers a FUN work environment. Read on to learn more about this awesome team and how Kin helped them say farewell to spreadsheets.
Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?
[MH] I’m Milly Hume, VP of People at YLD. I love crips, of any kind!
What’s the story of YLD?
[MH] YLD is a Software Consultancy & Training company with offices in London and Lisbon. The company was founded by Nuno Job in November 2013 and quickly went from a one-person band to a team of 37 software engineers and digital transformation enthusiasts. Nuno realised pretty early on that software could be written in a much better and efficient way, and that there weren’t many companies out there capable of doing this.
A strong believer that in the future all companies will be technology companies, he created YLD to bring the Silicon Valley engineering culture to businesses to the UK, helping them make their company successful and benefit from properly written software. To do this, he’s put together a team of engineers with a similar mindset who have dedicated their life to working with modern software engineering best practices, and have built and run technology businesses for several years. Supported by our amazing back-office crew, YLD is now enabling its enterprise clients to achieve digital transformation globally.
What’s great about working at YLD?
[MH] The one thing that makes our workplace unique is the great people working for us and the overall office environment! We are a very social bunch, our office is very informal and there is always something going on, either organised by YLD or people’s own initiative.
We are technology enthusiasts and very active in the developer community. Our engineers regularly talk at conferences and meetups that many of us attend. Every once in awhile we hold office “Craicathons”, internal events where we get to work on specific IT projects, or learn the basics of coding for the non-technical YLDers on the team. Additionally, YLD actively supports its employees’ personal development and encourages everyone to attend conferences or take specific training courses that could be beneficial for their personal growth.
We are passionate about craft beer and every Friday at beer o’clock the whole company gets together to celebrate the end of the week and spend time socialising while sipping great British craft beer, sometimes even our own (yes, we’ve got quite a few home brewers among our people!). Sometimes we even have an international food tasting to experience the best from the great variety of nationalities that make up our team.
Every day someone on the team chooses the music we’ll be playing in the office as our soundtrack for the day. We even have our own YLD playlist on Spotify!
Our running club has been active for a while. Quite a few of us love running and we usually get together on our lunch break once, sometimes twice a week, to run together. Our running team recently entered a 10K race to support the Winnicott Foundation, a charity we are actively contributing to as part of our CSR efforts.
At least once a year the whole company gets together for a company trip. This year we went to Lisbon, and it was great! In November we usually have our annual party to celebrate the company’s birthday, where we get to celebrate another year at YLD with our employees, clients, partners and friends. In short, we enjoy spending time together and always try to make the most of it!
Please share some insight into YLD’s approach to employee and workplace operations. How has Kin played a role?
[MH] When I first joined YLD, as with many startup businesses, everything was held on spreadsheets, google docs, and personal drives so finding out who we actually employed was a lengthy process! Now, everything is held in Kin. Who they are, what they do, when they started, when they are on holiday, how much we pay them, where they live….the list goes on.
“Kin has totally transformed the way we manage people data.”
More recently, we’ve started using the review functionality for new employee probation periods. It’s so helpful to have everything stored in one place, against the employee file so as the HR Director if someone asks me about an employee, it’s just a few clicks and I have the data for them. It makes me look like a total pro! Pretty soon, we are going to start storing individual objectives in Kin too. In fact, it’s one of my own personal KPIs to have this in place by the end of Q3 and for this to lead on to meaningful development conversations too!