Ocasta in 2017
This year we focused heavily on the people who make Ocasta what we are, we continued our strong investment in our product suite Oplift, and launched many bespoke customer projects 👌
People
We've grown steadily through the year with seven new Ocastars joining the team; Hayley our marketing coordinator, Viktoria and Megan to manage our projects, Oliver who is building our server components, Vanessa to create our iOS apps, and Daniel and Freyja to make anything for the web!
Viktoria added to our already Swedish-inspired culture by organising a weekly fika, a chance for the team to sit down to chat with some coffee and cake 🍰 We get to show off our baking skills and take a few moments away from work to talk about anything we like.
We'd tried variants of Flexi-Fridays through 2016, but this year we committed to daily flexitime to help everyone have a better work/life balance.
As a team we decided to support MakerClub's BrightSparks and sponsored two Codebars.
We wrapped up 2017 with a company retrospective; focusing on how we felt, what we'd achieved and the things we'd lacked, learned, liked and longed for this year.
Our Work
We released 43 major updates and new projects throughout the year for new and existing customers 💪
Some of these included a tool to help logisticians plan out in the field for Médecins Sans Frontières, being UX governance experts for JISC's Data Shared Service Project, and working with artists Elise Liversedge and Mary Hooper to create their emotion tracking app: Locate.
What's fuelling the Ocastars for all these releases? We have sipped our way through a massive 51kg of delicious beans from our friends Horsham coffee roasters 😵 ☕️ Although tea's not on the backbench, as we've drunk at least 1,700 cups this year.
Oplift
We continued to grow our product suite Oplift, our multi-award winning collection of tools all designed to engage staff and improve customer service 📈Adding to our Engage app to keep everyone in the loop and launching Oplift Review; a tool to help with store audits, staff reviews and performance tracking 📊
We launched the new website for Oplift, pitched at Retail Week Live, and joined an exciting innovation programme (which we can't talk about till January!). Our fortnightly newsletter has helped deliver plenty tips on employee experience straight to your inbox.
It's been another award-winning year 🏆 We scooped first prize for Best use of technology in employee engagement at the 2017 Engage awards, along with the Gold prize for Best customer service programme at the 2017 TJ Awards 👏
What’s Next
We’ll be launching Oplift Learn in 2018 as an extension to our Engage app and bringing Oplift to the App Store to support customers that don’t have a central mobile device management system.
This year we found flexible hours meant it was harder for those who wanted to socialise outside of work, so we’re going to offer more opportunities to spend some time with one another outside of the workplace. We’re going to do more skillshares to better benefit from one another’s knowledge – with the hope to open these up to people outside the team too.
We’ve partnered up with Wired Sussex to sponsor more Codebars through 2018, starting with a workshop on the 20th of February! We’ll be working with the Brighton Digital Media Academy as industry partners to support their students getting experience in digital workplaces.
I’d like to take this moment to pass on my thanks to the hardworking team at Ocasta, their families, and all of our customers for making this possible. Here’s to a great 2018
