Statutory Maternity and Paternity Pay with Emma Raftery

Tom: Hello and welcome to the Make Things Better podcast. Today I am joined by Emma Raftery. Welcome on the show Emma, how are you doing today?

Emma: I'm good. Thank you. It's nice to be here on very rare. Sunny day in Manchester

Tom: It is rare, it’s very rare indeed. Yeah It's really great to have you here. So do you want to start off by giving us, given us a bit of a introduction to yourself, a bit of a background on how you got into tech and what you're doing now and Aire Logic as well.

Emma: Yeah. So I've, worked in marketing for about 17 years I've joined Aire Logic and the marketing team in February, so not been here for too long. Prior to working at Aire Logic, I worked at Midcounties Cooperative for a while, which is really nice, working in sort of a tech for good sector. and then I worked for some tech startups, which weren’t amazing experiences. And then I ended up looking for a job when I was on maternity leave. My son Freddie was six months old, and I got a phone call from Luke Parker, who works in the talent team at Aire Logic. Really, really lovely guy. And he sold me the dream about our Aire Logic. I didn't realise companies like that existed really, so they're employee owned. So every, employee of the company is a part owner. So we make decisions together, after you've been there a year every sort of quarter, you get, effectively dividends, which is a nice little bonus. And there, a tech for good company, which is amazing. So when I was interviewing, I thought, do I tell these people that I've got a three year old and a under six months old, like, no one's going to hire me? And they were so understanding and really nice. So we worked my interviews around Freddie's nap times. They knew that I didn't want to start straight away. So they start, they waited after hiring me for three months. So my maternity leave ended. And then my husband started his statutory paternity leave we had great sort of settling in with them. They've known all along that, I've got two young kids, which didn't scare them off, which was unusual in tech. And then three weeks after work and after waiting so long for me to join, I had an operation which went horrendously wrong. I had a month off after that they paid me in full for the month. I'm kept in touch, get in touch with my family. Paid me in full, sort of settling back in again afterwards. I think that's so unusual for any company, really. Never mind to consultancy to really care about their staff like that. Even though I'd been there for, like three weeks.

Tom: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like you've had a really good experience so far at Aire Logic then

Emma: yeah, they're amazing. I'd recommend them to, to anyone really that an incredible company to work for.

Tom: Yeah. And we've obviously we’ve really enjoyed working with Aire Logic as well. And like our values seemed to just really, really align. So you mentioned a bit about bad experiences in the past working in tech. I was wondering if you could share a bit more on that.

Emma: Yeah, I think erm for anyone that looks at my LinkedIn. I won't go into too much detail in case I get in trouble, but you get companies that are really, overly just profit driven, don't really care about their staff if they get into the slightest bit of financial trouble, they just snap, make redundancies. Especially for people that have been there under two years and that is just the complete opposite of what I think a good company does. And when people talk about company culture, I think company culture is a way that your employees talk about the company and talk to each other within the company and sort of the harmony within the company. And, a lot of tech companies, a culture you get is competitive within each other. It doesn't foster great working environments. and again, that's that's not something that I was looking for in a new company, which is why I was so blown away when Luke was telling me about Aire Logic.

Tom: Yeah, yeah, it sounds, it sounds like things have fallen into place for you really well now.

Emma: Yeah.

Tom: And in terms of employee owns, can you tell us a bit more about that? Like what does that mean? And you know you said dividends every quarter. Like how does all of that work? I've just not really come across this much before.

Emma: So Joe Waller and Mike Odling, two amazing guys, they founded Aire Logic in 2007, and they've always been very, very pro tech for good social responsibility, making the world better. And they'd be able to tell this story much better than I could but they just thought, you know, how do we really, you know, walk the walk. You know, we can say we do all this stuff, but are we really doing what's best for our staff? So they they became employee owned. So basically they reduced their shares in the company. They'll effectively have one share each. Now every employee has one share with the company. So when we have things like, it's like an excess of money left over after spend, people vote on what we do with it. Do we put it into pensions, do we increase charitable donations? Do we increase spend somewhere else in the company? So we're also very low hierarchy. So it isn't a case of like one person is the director. And they said you've absolutely got to do this and you don't want to. Everyone makes decisions together. So there are sort of pros and cons of that. Sometimes it can take a while to make decisions, and we've got lots of goals and committees and groups, which is great because everyone's really involved and everyone really cares about the success of the company. And we all say that we have three values that we live by throughout the company. Is it tech for good for our company and is it good for our staff? So if we get a project on that fits all those three things. Amazing, right? If there's something that doesn't fit all of those three values then we're not going to do it.

Tom: Yeah that makes sense. So does that provide some clarity around like the overall company's sort of goals and objectives and make it easier for people to sort of know what's right and what isn't for you.

Emma: Yeah I think if you were to join Aire Logic you'd have to be really interested in the tech's for good space anyway. The consultancy work well, it is so competitive that, you know, people throw anything, at developers and architects and people to work for them. But at Aire Logic, we, you know, we're really open and transparent with the work that we do. So, we have, quarterly all hands we have monthly, weekly calls. we're transparent with everything across all of our, our intranet and our socials. We use slack. So we got channels on slack where we keep everyone up to date. So there's no one in the company that will go I didn't know we did that or I didn't know that's what are values was because it's so ingrained in all of us.

Tom: Yeah. And how have you personally found it? Like so far working for Aire Logic and having this different structure where it sounds like it is a lot more flats than a sort of hierarchy or, structure that's quite common elsewhere.

Emma: At first I found it a little bit strange because normally, and like a senior marketing role, you’d make the decisions or you'd say, you know, this is what we're going to do, and then you give people the work to do it, whereas here it is a lot fairer. But at first I thought, I know this is my budget, but do I need to go for someone to sign off? Because in a past company you get these teams where you know you are the marketer, but the CEO basically signs everything off, and then you put a campaign in place and then they go, oh, actually, no, I don't fancy doing that today. And then they kill it. so at first I thought, it says someone I need to be going to for the sign off. But there wasn't really, which is nice. So I just do whatever I want now.

Tom: Sounds alright. Yeah. And in terms of pay. So statutory pay, because obviously you've had a couple of children over the last four years, and I know you're very passionate about, maternity and paternity pay, statutory maternity pay and statutory paternity pay. I've said I statutory pay a lot of times now haven’t I and, so I'll jump to the point. So. Yeah. Do you want to just share, like, kind of your views and perspectives on it? is it too much? Is it too little? You know, how do you feel about it?

Emma: I think if you're a company who is trying to, improve your quality and diversification, if you want to hire women, if you want to hire any young people and you're only offering statutory maternity pay and statutory maternity leave, you need to get a grip like you penalizing your staff who want to have families, and you're not going to be able to grow and scale as a company because no one of childbearing age is going to want to work for you. Like, if I had two job offers and one of them is like, oh, we're an amazing company, you get free fruit on a Friday. We got a ping pong table. We only do the minimum auto-enrolment for your pension, we only do like Statutory maternity, Maternity pay. And then I got another one that says, you know, you get 3 to 6 months paid maternity leave. you know, you can increase the amount of time you have off. We offer everything enhanced. We we offer a higher pension. They are the ones I’m going to choose.

Tom: Yeah.

Emma: I think it's really sad that there's a lot of women that don't get to have a year off with, their a child who then have to pay a fortune to put effectively a young child into, into childcare because you get something like, I think I got every four weeks about 670 pounds statutory, and then you get about 100 pounds, maybe a little bit more now with child benefit. I don't know anyone who can afford to live off that, a single parent especially. I know, lower income, families. Where do they find the money from? And if you're a company that, you know, you're you're bragging online and promoting about how much money you make and what your profits are, yet you're not reinvesting it back into your staff. You're never going to grow. It's really unfair, and I think the time has come for people that are really starting to say no to these companies, even things like pensions, if you only offer the minimum amount, you're forcing people like, you know, the cost of living crisis to say, do I pull money out of my take home now to invest in my pension so I can retire earlier so I can have a comfortable retirement? Or God forbid, I need to pay for care homes out of their pensions? Or do they think I know I can't afford that, I can barely feed the kids. I'm paying a grand a month for childcare. Like where is this money supposed to come from.

Tom: Yeah.

Emma: So I think the companies that arn’t investing, and it is a big part of things like social responsibility as well as they're not willing to invest in their staff. I just think they're a joke and they're not going to grow.

Tom: Yeah, it really does make it very, very inaccessible for a lot of people because, I mean, I actually only looked into it yesterday before this podcast, but when I saw the amount of money that you get per week when you're on, statutory pay, I was just like, blown away. I was like, that is so low. Like, that is too low given the cost of living crisis.

Emma: Absolutely.

Tom: I was absolutely amazed by it. What do you think the best live alternative is like? What would you offer if you like, owned a company anywhere to set the statutory pay?

Emma: I think really a lot of tech companies now offer a year because there's always a fight for talent, which really heightened during Covid, and people are looking at other ways that they can entice people to work for them outside of just a base salary. I think if you're just offering statutory, get over yourself, I'll look after your staff, think about hiring people. A year I think would be the most fair. And I know smaller businesses won't be able to afford that. But, you know, I've worked for companies before that 1 billion pound companies, they only offer statutory. Yeah. The shareholders are getting thousands and thousands a year in dividends. and it's not just they are offering the money while they're out off It's how they welcome people back into work as well. A lot of people don't think about the re-onboarding process after someone's had maternal or paternity leave. They don't think, oh, she's had a year off. I great get her back on, you know, she's got 50,000 emails in her inbox. I jump back into all these meetings again. You don't think that this might be the first time they've left their child for a long period of time? they've got someone, know that they've carried in their stomach for nine months to, to grow them. They've sent a yeah, like, every second of every day for a year with this child. And then suddenly they've got to trust a childminder or a nursery for them. Like it's really mentally draining and really upsetting. so to have settleing in and you know, do a few hours a day at first and condense your hours to, to four day weeks, if you can. A lot of people can't afford to drop a day, but condensing hours can really work. I found that's worked really well for me. Like when I was, in the Midcounties Co-operative, I had an amazing boss called Jacqui Marcus. she had daughter, funnily enough, had her first child at the same time, I was pregnant with Margot. And before I went back, I didn't know that I had the option to condense my hours. I just thought, I'm going to have to go back to work now. I'm gonna have to go to the office full time. and then just leave my daughter in a nursery or with a childminder from, like, half seven in the morning to half six at night, because that's, you know, how long it take me to drop her off, get to the office, get home again. And then she said, why don't you do condensed hours? And I didn't know that was an option at all. she really helped guide me through the returning to work. I had to know another boss called Molly at the time, and they were both incredible and really helpful. And so supportive. Yeah, I've got friends that have gone back to work, they've not been able to do hybrid or remote work, they've gone back. They've spent more than their mortgage and childcare. They dropped the kit off as soon as they wake up to get them home, it's bedtime. They effectively watch the kids sleep and play with them at weekends and that's it. And they've had no support to go back. so I think if you're a leader and it doesn't matter if you're a male or a female leader, if you've got anyone in your office that's returning to work, come up with a new onboarding process for them, help them settle back in again and don't have after work drinks every week that I've sort of encouraged to go to. Because if I'm rushing back home to pick my kid up, I say them before bedtime. I don't want to feel guilted to that I've got to go for some drinks in the pub first.

Tom: Yeah

Emma: It's the same with industry events. Why all industry events at like 6:00 at night? Like I don't want to drop my kid off it. I know just after breakfast and then have a full day of work and then go to an event, get home at 9:00 and then just see them the next day. They need to be more accessible, like do lunchtime events, do day time events. I was on, a breakfast panel, through a guy called Steven White, organized last week. It was fab. Did a panel, went to work home for tea time it was amazing. Yeah, I've probably bothered on far too much about this.

Tom: No, no, no, it's really interesting to be honest. So in terms of those condensed hours, what sort of like time frame were you working in?

Emma: So I do 36 hours a week, but split over four days. At Midcounties, I did 40 hours a week, split over four days. So I do sort of. Then I did ten hours a day. I don't do that much now.

Tom: Yeah

Emma: But I'd so start a bit earlier, do a bit more work when the kids are in bed. But I'm often out at about events all the time as well. so I have quite sporadic working hours I've sort of given myself, so I'm always, like, slacking people at really random hours and having to remember to put don't feel obligated to reply, wait till your working hours because I don't particularly enjoy working like a normal 9 to 5. Yeah, I like being a bit more flexible and that's something that sort of Aire Logic has allowed me to do. I don't know if I know that I do it, but yeah, it's working.

Tom: Well, yeah, I'm very similar, to be honest. Yeah. And, I like that flexibility. It just makes sense as well in terms of productivity, because if you're just working a 9 to 5 every day and you're like, locked into those hours entirely, I mean, there's going to be some days where you're just really needing to wake up, you know, a little bit later that day. Yeah, start and finish a bit later. the other thing about the maternity and paternity statutory pay, you know, earlier on that question, I asked, what would you do if you like the owner of the business? But I think when I look back on that question, I'm like, actually, anyone in a business, in my opinion, should be able to have that voice. And obviously at Aire Logic and Hive IT, It's very flat in terms of the structure. And you know, it's like yesterday I was starting to message in the slack like sort of question of things about I've owned one, because I was curious, like, could that be improved? so I suppose my question would be, who do you think should be sort of developing that, that policy and how should they go about developing it and, sort of answering my own question a little bit here, but I feel like part of it should be co-designed with the people who are going to be going on maternity or paternity leave, or who I've been on it recently and have had that experience already.

Emma: Yeah, absolutely. So I think when like policies like this are made, they're often made in silos. So you've got people that it's probably made with like H.R. and the CEO and the CEO goes oh, don't spend loads of money and H.R goes we're not going to retain people and then they work together and they're often not to like, typecast them. But really senior people that maybe had their kids like ten, 15, 20 years ago and they don't understand the implications or the practicalities of going on maternity leave now and, you know, doing it in a new world since Covid and the options available now and, and, you know, a cost of living crisis as well because I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon. So I'd say don't work in silos. Work with people. Everyone in your business, it could be people that, aren't even thinking about having children yet, but what would they want? What would make them want to stay? What would help them? People that have recently had children. What do they hate about coming back to work? What really helped them? What would have made it easier for them? And then that the senior people as well like that, that lived experiences of how it affected them. But I'd say be as open as possible, with everyone in your business. And I'd also say like send some anonymous forms out initially. Don't expect people to put their hands up in meetings when they're discussing something like this, because especially if you're a younger woman and you've been in the company less than two years, so you're at risk of just being binned off effectively, you're not going to put your hand up and say, I want to know about our maternity policy. I want to make this better because I automatically think, oh, she's gonna be a baby. She's going to disappear. And there's still a lot of stigma around women going on maternity leave. And I'm them coming back. so I'd say like that they don't feel confident enough to put their hand up and ask these questions and fight for change because they're worried about their jobs.

Tom: Yeah.

Emma: And you're never going to really progress or improve any policies if people are working in a culture of fear. So I'd say start off anonymously, but, you know, have open, transparent conversations with with everyone in your business and your stakeholders as well, like look outside of the business because you don't want to work in an echo chamber when you're making such big decisions.

Tom: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What do you mean by the stigma around people going on maternity leave and then not coming back?

Emma: So, I'd say any woman that, you know, would have I've heard that they've been in a business, that someone's got a maternity leave and you get predominantly like, no offense, I don't, I don't like get cancelled here or anything but you're going to get older men going oh she's not going to come back is she?. Because I think back in the day you go on maternity leave and then you know, you then have another one. and you wouldn't go back to work. You would be a stay at home mum back when people could afford to live off one salary. And it's sort of a stereotype that's not really disappeared. So even though I think most women do come back to work now, you know, they'll come back to work part time. You do get a lot of people, especially more traditional industries, just assuming someone's not going to come back. So maybe they don't need to protect their job or people get made redundant on a maternity leave because they they basically backfill the role while you've been off. and they don't want you to come back or they think, you know, oh, I don't want someone who's going to catch a bug off their kid from nursery every week and avoid a sick leave, or it's got to stay off when they get sick and they just don't want to deal with it, which is obviously highly illegal. but there's still loads of stigma around that. When I was pregnant with Margot, I, I got asked so many times, not just from people where I worked, but just friends or stakeholders. Anyone external, like, are you going to come back? Like, are you actually going to go back to work? You're not going to stay at home. Like, sorry, I've got a fortune that costs about 50 million pounds a year, like a mortgage. So I'm obviously not going to just stay at home. But there's still so much stigma around that. Yeah. How did that make you feel when people are asking those questions? to be honest, it really, really angered me. It's a really personal decision whether to go back to work or not. When you have a child and it's impacted by lots of things like do you enjoy your job? Is it a career you've worked towards, like your entire life that people think you're just going to give up because you've had a child? Can you afford to go back to work? There's lots of women that would want to be a stay at home loans but can't afford to, there's women that, you know, like, for example, my degree that, I graduated in 2010 is in marketing and PR. It's taken me 16 years to get to marketing director level. And if someone just said, you know, are you really going back do you not want to just stay at home. I spent 16 years working to get to the point where I am now. I do you think it's an easy decision to give it up? I think a lot of people are really condescending when they ask that question as well. Or they think, oh, you know, my wife stayed at home, my mum stayed at home, and they make you think like you don't care about your children enough to to stay at home with them. Plus, a lot of the time, if you stay in a home with two kids day in, day out, every single day, it gets really boring. Like you don't get a lot of, like, stimulation yourself. It's like, okay, well, we'll put little baby Cocomelon on. We'll go to the park and I can hand feed you your food. How am I supposed to talk to you so well, it's amazing and lovely and great spending time with your kids. Like, I don't want to do it all the time.

Tom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you feel like there's a lot of, like, misconceptions and judgments by people who just haven't really had these kind of conversations.

Emma: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then it can be quite damaging as well for women that want children but can't have them as well. Who look at other areas of their life because they get asked a lot as well. Are you going to have children? Stop asking people. It's not relevant to the workplace. Yeah, yeah.

Tom: Definitely. Yeah because I think the world's just changing so much now. But there's still just some things that I just kind of lost in the past. Yeah, that's been passed down for years. And it's just like, jeez, just we kind of need to change our attitudes towards certain things.

Emma: Yeah, definitely another thing that's changing a lot is tech for good. And this is becoming more and more popular in this industry. You know, a lot of tech companies are trying to look like they're doing a lot of tech for good. I guess I wanted to ask you, what do you think about this sort tech industry as a whole and this kind of movement towards tech for good? Do you think companies are genuinely taking a good approach here, or are there some ways in which companies are also maybe like doing things like greenwashing and trying to pretend like they're doing really good, but actually they have some questionable ethics?

Emma: Yeah, I think greenwashing is a massive problem in tech, because people can be really quick to jump on a trend and they say, oh, tech for good, let's slap that on our website. We'll do a LinkedIn post about it. We'll go and do a quick litter pick and pretend we're tech for good when they're not you look at that board, there's no diversity there. They don't do anything for charity. The projects that they work towards arn’t sort of working towards a better world, like you guys have actually recently lost a BCORP status, for working with shell. And I think the amount of money and time and effort it goes into becoming A BCORP, you should really believe in it. And then to go and work with someone like shell. I think if your client is suing Greenpeace, like, you know, you're not on the side of the good guys like Greenpeace working tirelessly to, you know, create a better planet. And then you've got shell suing them like, what are you doing?

Tom: Yeah, that's wild

Emma: Yeah, it's ridiculous, isn't it? And then there's a big trend around purpose driven and sustainable marketing at the moment. That everyone tried to jump on board, but really like one of the things that I love about Aire Logic is those three values I mentioned earlier, like, is it tech for good? Is it good for the company? Is it good for our staff? And we do a lot of work for people like the NHS, but we also do a lot of like charity work and like just pro bono consultancy or product work.

Tom: Yeah.

Emma: So we work with a company called the Lancaster Model who work and a lot of fact with a lot of school nurses and effectively they school nurses before they started working with Aire logic and Aire Innovate would create this so this huge, huge document such just like pages and pages of paper based questionnaires where they'd send to the parents of children at school to try and assess if these children needed help. obviously the parents might fill that out. They might not. But you wouldn't get the voice of the child. So when the Lancaster model started working with our Aire Innovate, they started using one of our products froms for health, where now the actual children themselves, unlike the teenagers, can fill the forms in themselves. Or you know, the parents will do it themselves like the six year olds, for example. Who it would it be able to do it? and that's completely changed, like people's lives, really? Who are the end users? people like it in Derby, Kent, for example, who use that. They've, reported that that they’re finding people early before they really have a problem.

Tom: Yeah.

Emma: Like theres a lady called Cath Lancaster. She sort of invented the Lancaster model, and she say it's like a conveyor belt. And at the end of the conveyor belt, it's a fire. And in the past, they'd find the child while they're in the fire, and it's gone too far and they can't be helped. But now, if they found them at the start of the conveyor belt. So how it works is they figure it out and it be questions like, you know, how is your home life? Is anything you're worried about, you being bullied in school, for example, things like that. And then in the past, if that filled out by a parent on a paper fall, they might not want to speak to their parents about it or their home life might be the problem. But now the child will fill it out themselves and they immediately the skill and assets immediately get an alert if there is an issue, and then they get it immediately referral to something like calms, other mental health support to the GP's. And then they sort of nip the problem in the bud really before these children do start consider things like self-harm and suicide. And it really the work they're doing is completely changing lives. And they then send the data, anonymized to other schools in the councils where they can look at it and say, these are trending issues in all of these schools. What are we going to do about it? And then they shape national policy, and this, this other work, like we worked on the, the book, the Covid bookings, national protest and things like that. That was like a really quick turnaround. But, everything we do, it's got the, the end goal that it's got to make the world better. And we're not just going, okay, we're going to go and litter pick or spend a day in a charity shop, which is what some of the companies do. We're actually living and breathing it, which is really thanks to to Joe and Mike, the founders, because they, they created Aire Logic and they've shaped it into something so amazing and so positive that other people who are interested, like, really want to work with us because they want to make the world a better place as well.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That project sounds amazing. I had not heard about that before. And yeah, I think that's the thing with tech for good is you kind of want everything you do to be in alignment, in my opinion. I think if you just kind of say in like, oh yeah, we're going to go through this litter pick or whatever it is like once every few weeks, or you're kind of doing some other tech for good projects on the side. But then there's this massive contradiction, because actually your projects themselves, which you spend the most time and money on, on arn’t ethical. I just work with some big companies to try and make money. It's like, well, it's not really tech for good. It's like, what's the net impacts? You know, if you take everything into account and you actually have a net positive or negative impacts on the world, and I think a lot of companies are having a net negative impact despite doing a lot of good. So that's the main thing to measure, weigh up.

Emma: I think an easy way to sort of work towards it as well is who your partners are like, amazing partnerships director Neil. That's why, you know, we work with people like you, and he goes out and finds other tech for good companies, but I we wouldn't a partner with hive if, you wern’t a tech for good company as well. And if you weren't working towards towards things like that and positive change. So I'd say if you're a company who wants to start in a tech the good space, but does it know where, look at your suppliers, look at people who like, you know, you're getting your merch. you know, recruitment companies, for example. There's always people out there who work in that space who can help you.

Tom: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And I think you're right that it has so much, so much benefit both from, like, the world as a whole, but also like this staff in terms of feeling good about, like what you're doing and your impact you're having on the world, and then that can impact retention. And then also the way in which, yeah, you are going to attract other sort of companies like Aire Logic for us who are doing really good in the world, and then you partner together and then you can have a bigger impact together. And it just kind of works out quite well. I remember like once I seen a company, I think they got in touch with us and wanted to like, partner. But then it's like you look at like for me, the first thing I'll always look out for any company is going to be the, the case studies, so see what case studies they've done. And then it's like, if that isn't actually that good, just like, you know, if they're working with some companies and I'm, that I don’t know about that.

Emma: Yeah

Tom: I'm I'm not really, I'm not really going to be too excited to, or want to like, partner with them. Basically. I think that's the main place to go for me. It's like, yeah, we just look at what work they've done in the past. Okay, so what have we must be covered? So far, we've covered maternity and paternity leave. Covered the tech for good, and we covered it a little bit about being employee-owned at Aire Logic. Was anything else that you wanted to talk about today?

Emma: I guess my, like, resounding takeaway. I'd want people to have from this is like, pay people more, look after your staff, more like, have policies in place where they feel able and comfortable to work for companies that do want to do tech for good, but also aren't scared to have children because I think they're going to be thrown into poverty.

Tom: Yeah.

Emma: So if for any company out that there are ways that you can do better, so just start doing it. It's basically

Tom: love, love, that yeah. And I feel like the answer might be quite similar to what you just said, but the question we ask every single guest is, what can people do to make things better? And you can interpret this however you like.

Emma: I'd say, you know, doing better starts with their company. So create an environment in a culture where your staff feel able to to be themselves, to have open discussions with you, to make changes internally. And then, you know, those changes will then start happening externally as well and don't work for people like Shell.

Tom: Love that yeah so thanks so much for coming on the podcast today Emma. where can people find you on social media if they want to get in touch and talk with you any further?

Emma: so we're very active on LinkedIn, so it's just LinkedIn.com / Aire Logic or Aire Innovate, we are doing loads of events at the moment and loads of webinars as well, and they're always really, really open to chat with people interested in Aire Logic. Joe and Mike as well are always really happy to speak to people about being employee-owned. So drop them a message and then they can tell me off afterwards, for all their extra messages they’re getting.

Tom: Oh, awesome. I'm I have to send them a message. Get them on the podcast as well.

Emma: Yeah, definitely.

Tom: All right. Perfect. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks a lot to anyone listening or watching to this podcast or reading it through our transcript and we hope you have an amazing rest of your day. Goodbye.