Why Employees Love Form3

This month, we launched #TheFlexaLoveFest. In line with Valentine's Day, this campaign was created in order to celebrate our Flexified partners and to provide an opportunity for their employees to express what it is they love the most about their employers.

Who are Form3?

For those of you who haven't yet crossed paths with Form3, allow us to introduce you:

Form3 was established in 2016 by four banking and technology leaders with a single purpose - to transform outdated, complex and costly payments infrastructure to a modern, cloud-native, real-time Payments-as-a-Service.

They provide Banks and regulated FinTechs across the globe, an end-to-end managed payments service that delivers complete payment processing, clearing and settlement to the universe of payment schemes through a single API.

Building employee relationships

So, how have Form3 established such a harmonious relationship with their employees?

Well, let's start by taking a look at their approach to flexible working.

Form3 genuinely care about the happiness of their employees and their people are given the trust they need to excel at what they do.

As a fully remote company, their team can work from wherever they are happiest and most productive, whether that is in an office or from a hammock in the garden.

Despite being fully remote, Form3 understand how valuable human connection is and work hard to ensure that employees don't miss out on this element during their workday.

Form3 employee benefits

Form3 provide their employees with a range of flexible benefits, all of which positively impact their personal and working lives in different ways. These benefits include:

"When we first started Form3, we hadn’t seriously considered the idea that we would grow to become a company where the majority of staff work from home 5 days a week. But when we looked at how we could best evolve as a rapidly expanding start-up, we realised that building a remote-first culture brought a huge number of benefits. In particular, as a company that is ultimately driven by our employees, allowing our staff to build their own personal environment, work from anywhere, and collaborate with the rest of the team on an equal footing, allows us to hire and work with a diverse group of some of the smartest people, no matter where they are based.

Although we are only 350 people strong, we already have staff from over 40 nationalities who are based in more than 14 countries. Remote and flexible working is now completely embedded in our culture.

Communication

This one seems pretty obvious, but to make remote working effective, the whole way a company communicates has to change. We have made tools such as Slack and Zoom the primary means of communication (whether staff are in an office or not), and by moving all discussion, meetings, and collaboration onto those platforms, all employees feel like they’re an equal part of the team. Regardless of where employees are based, that also brings the benefits of more open and transparent communication across the board - all conversations are primarily in open forums, rather than closed groups, and meetings can easily be recorded and replayed if team members can’t join directly.

Trusting our employees

All of our employees have been hired by us because we really believe they will have a positive impact at Form3. We trusted them enough to hire them, and so we trust them enough to do the work they have to do. At Form3 there is no handholding, micro-managing, clock-watching, or side-glancing paranoia. If you want to head out for a run at 10am, or pick the kids up from school, that’s fine with us. If we can’t trust our teams to do this, we hired the wrong people!

Meeting in person

We can’t stress this one enough – meeting in-person really matters. We always try and get new joiners to work face to face with their colleagues for the first few days together in our London office. We’re also big fans of having company meetups a few times a year; they provide an essential chance for meaningful in-house/remote bonding that strengthens collaboration for the long-term. It’s not all business though! We make sure employees who normally work remotely get the opportunity for social events with their colleagues too.

Form3 are proof that no matter what industry you're in, flexibility can be achieved. It's all about listening to people as individuals as well as a collective, and making the effort to understand what it is they need in order to thrive. It all boils down to choice, and as long as employers take the time to establish a set flexible working policy, employees have the ability to assess their options and choose how they'd like to work. Putting power into the hands of your team and letting them know you trust them to work in a way that'll optimise their performance, can have a tremendous effect on company culture and even the business' overall success.