2023 Best Place to Work: Kokoro

The past two years have seen 17 people promoted – a third of employees – with Kokoro supporting linear promotion routes and sideways moves, particularly in technical departments where data processors have moved into its analytics arm and software development departments.

Kokoro has 62 employees, with 89% retention this year, increasing to 100% among the business’ senior team. Diversity is also important at Kokoro, with multiple religions and nationalities represented, 57% of senior roles held by women and a broad age profile across the business.

The company prioritises wellbeing and training, while also looking at updating training and implementing best practice, such as exploring how artificial intelligence can supplement its research, including survey code lists and automating video content summaries, and featuring developing resilience around fieldwork days in its qualitative training.

There are also fortnightly ‘huddles’ that bring the whole company together to share progress, hearing from both junior and senior staff. 

Each quarter, Kokoro’s ‘Amazing People Truly Valued’ workstream has a specific focus, with this year’s first quarter featuring raising awareness of resilience, growth mindsets and open conversations around wellbeing through webinars, quizzes and workshops. 

Kokoro has a long-running graduate scheme, with graduates on the scheme provided with a buddy and a line manager in the company. The business relaxed the scheme’s criteria this year to include school graduates to broaden its thinking and recruits’ backgrounds, appointing its first ‘non-graduate graduate’ earlier this year. 

Kokoro has a number of other policies designed to support staff, including employee groups, in-house surveys, shared business plans, charity partnerships, volunteering time-off, a bonus scheme and company-wide celebrations.

The business also runs twice weekly company lunches, cooked by its celebrity chef, Jon Watts, a former prisoner who is about to launch his first professional cookbook. 

Alison Bainbridge, founder at Kokoro, said: “In an industry which is all about people, it means a lot to win ‘best place to work’ – especially on the back of being agency of the year last year.

“I’ve always loved the diversity of people working at Kokoro, and aim to make everyone fearless in wrestling with the ambiguity of human insights in search of commercially impactful insights. I’ve made so many life-long friends over the years of leading Kokoro. This award is for both old and current colleagues.”