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Here at Goupie, you won't find any employee working more than 30 hours a week. In fact, most of our employees are on an hourly rate choosing to keep their time at work to 12 hours a week. We love this! It's important to us that our employees feel like they have a life outside of work, and that they are in control of their own work-life balance.
We have five employees working in the factory, and they make up the bulk of our team. It's hard work in the factory, and much more of a physical of a job than you might expect. As every batch is hand mixed, cut, topped and bagged; there's an awful lot of repetitive movements, attacking muscles you never knew you had, and all of it on your feet. Of course, once you've worked in the factory for a little time, you work up these muscles and don't feel the burn quite so much! Even so, we feel it's important that no one is subjected to that kind of strain for more than 6 hours at a time (ideally only 4 if we can help it!).
Aside from our employees physical health, we're interested in their mental health. As dedicated to Goupie as our employees are, they also have families and lives outside of the Goupie life. Our flexible working schedule means that we can offer work to those who may not have been able to find anything that fitted in with their existing lives.
When employees start with us, we discuss their schedule and arrange their working days around what's best for them. We then have an annual review to make sure that everything's still working for both of us. For example, Karen (who owns the farm we sit on) can only work Monday-Wednesday due to her other commitments around the farm. Paula, who's son has just started at secondary school, is now looking to start work a little later than she did when he was in primary school, so that she can still drop him off before she starts work.
It's a simple thing, made easier by our small size, but it's something we're determined to keep as we grow because we think that understanding and listening to your employees should be the norm. Without them, no-one would be getting any Goupie this Easter!
Of course, for certain jobs, those kinds of shifts can't work. We need to make sure that our customers can contact us during all business hours. Mother and daughter, Janet and Grace, who run the business together, work alongside each other swapping work from home days and preferred hours, so that someone is always there to answer the phones! We also use a number of ambassadors, who work remotely on content and other Goupie bits. This allows us to get a range of different perspectives and keeps them flexible, so they needn't travel to our remote farm very often!
It's a small team, in a small factory, but everyone is rested, and determined to give the best that they can whilst they're at work. We fully believe that we get 100% out of our employees at all times, and attribute a great deal of this to the fact that they can enjoy the rest of their life without worrying about work! We're sure there are some frowning faces out there, wondering why anyone would commit to a 30 hour week - but it seems to work for us!
We hope this has given you a little insight into a week at Goupie, if you have any questions about how we operate please do get in touch! We'd be delighted to answer questions and are always open to suggestions for improvements or new information...