In a consultancy the people are the product, so culture is not a perk, it is upstream of the work. Why we measure how our team feels, and why buyers should ask.

Work from happy, and why we bother to put a number on it

We have a phrase that started as a joke and stuck because it turned out to be true. Work from happy, not work from home. Where someone sits matters far less than whether the work is any good and the people doing it want to be there. It sounds soft. It is the opposite, and here is the hard-nosed version.

This connects with our data strategy and leadership work and, separately, with Hire For The Next Decade, Not The Last One.

In a consultancy, the people are the product

When you buy data and analytics work, you are not buying software. Microsoft makes the software. You are buying judgement: the call on how to model the thing, what to leave out, where your data is quietly lying to you. That judgement lives in people, and tired, mistrustful, half-out-the-door people make worse calls. Not because they are bad at the job, but because good judgement needs a little slack and a reason to care, and a burnt-out team has neither.

So culture is not the pleasant thing sitting next to the work. In this trade it sits upstream of it. Get it wrong and every client feels it eventually, in decisions that came out a touch lazier than they should have.

Why we measure it rather than claim it

Anyone can claim a good culture. Every consultancy on earth says its people are its greatest asset, usually on a careers page nobody believes. So we measure it instead, through Great Place to Work, which asks the team directly rather than taking the founders' word for it. We hold a place on the UK's Best Workplaces for Development list [confirm placing and year, e.g. 41st, 2026] and a Trust Index score of [confirm score] that the team gave us, not a rosette we handed ourselves.

We mention it for the same reason we tell clients to measure anything that matters: a thing you do not measure is a thing you are guessing at, and a data company guessing about whether its own people are alright is a peculiar blind spot to carry.

The bit that matters to clients

Here is why a buyer should care, beyond it being a nice thing to be true. The single biggest risk in a long data engagement is the person who understood your business walking out the door. Everything they held in their head, your edge cases, your odd legacy system, the reason that one number is the way it is, leaves with them. Keeping good people engaged is not an HR nicety in this work. It is continuity of the people who understand you, which is most of what you are paying for.

So when you choose a data partner, ask the question that tells you more than any case study: how do you keep the people who learn my business engaged, and how do you know your team is in good shape rather than assuming it. We would rather answer that with a score the team gave us and the calibre of the people we hire than with a promise. We staff the Analytics Acceleration Programme with that continuity in mind for exactly that reason.

And if you are a leader reading this about your own team, here is a free thing to do this quarter. Run one anonymous question: on a scale of nought to ten, how likely are you to recommend us as a place to work. That single number, gathered honestly and tracked over time, tells you more about the health of your business than most of the dashboards you already pay for. The companies that ask tend to be glad they did. The ones that avoid it usually suspect the answer already, which is precisely why they avoid it.

More about how we work is on our about page, and if it sounds like your sort of place, we are usually hiring.

If any of this sounds familiar, talk to us about your data.

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