Diana Brainova, Learning & Development Expert at CluneTech, sat down with Economy.bg to discuss the impact of our recent rebrand, and the improvements that CluneTech has made to its employee benefits package, including increasing the annual leave allowance for all Bulgaria-based staff. Check out her interview below!
For prospective employees, our new brand, CluneTech, clearly signals the focus on technology across our brands. It reflects our evolution and progress since 1996, when the group was first established, to what we are today – a hub for technology innovation, dedicated to making business better.
While our parent group has been rebranded from Taxback Group to CluneTech, we are still home to the same suite of innovative companies that continue to grow and attract more talent.
Part of our aim with the rebrand is to support our #OneTeam culture and approach with our employees. It applies to all employees and businesses across the group. CluneTech is about brilliant people and technology and our people remain at the core of everything we do. We rely on them to help us provide great customer experience and exceptional technology solutions to our customers, helping us to make business better.
We continue to improve our compensation package. After the recent upgrade announced in the summer of 2021, which included adding an Employee Assistance Programme and Life Insurance to our benefits package, we have decided to introduce an additional two days of annual leave, for all of our Bulgarian staff. These two days are in addition to the extra annual leave days given to long-term employees as part of our Milestone Recognition Programme, and they will apply to all staff from their first day of service in the company. The decision to increase the number of annual leave days aims to reward our employees for their continuous hard work and dedication. This new addition to our benefits package has been warmly welcomed by our people.
The pandemic conjured major changes to the way we work, ultimately leading to a future of flexibility at CluneTech. The transition to remote working was supported by our brand-new Flexible Working Policy which aims to give our employees more freedom and increased flexibility, helping them to achieve a better work-life balance. Our recent Pulse Survey data highlights that we made a step in the right direction – where 70% of staff expressed satisfaction with their work-life balance in Q1 of 2022, this figure had increased to 78% by the year’s end. We expect this additional leave will further help our people to balance their work and home lives.
Facilitating and responding to employee feedback is imperative to us here at CluneTech and many of the improvements we have made have been inspired by said feedback.
For instance, our employees, through various feedback channels, routinely expressed a need for a greater focus on learning & development. In response to this feedback, we introduced a brand-new Learning & Development strategy in 2021. This programme has been steadily gathering steam and improving the learning opportunities available to staff and this year will continue to focus on some key projects: our People Manager Development Programme, employee led career pathing, improving the new hire onboarding process, coaching and mentoring, and last but not least – LinkedIn Learning accounts to help our employees access the knowledge and skills they need to further their careers.
Our move to remote working has allowed us to place a greater emphasis on recognizing and rewarding our employees, and given us the opportunity to dramatically improve employee wellbeing and our benefits offering. We have successfully adapted our wellbeing and learning and development offerings to the online environment, helping us to stay competitive and to attract and retain the best talent.
Last year marked 20 years since the opening of our first office in Bulgaria. The company started with a small team of 15 employees and we are proud to say that, twenty years later, the majority of those employees are still working with us. Over the years our businesses have developed and the number of employees has increased tremendously. Currently, we employ nearly 1000 staff in Bulgaria alone. We have offices in Varna, Veliko Tarnovo and Shumen, but our current remote working model allows us to hire candidates from other locations too. IT and software development, finance and international taxation, customer care, marketing and human resources, are just some of the main areas for career development in CluneTech.
In the past year we hired nearly 200 new employees across Bulgaria. We expect to maintain these hiring rates in 2022. Although there is an increase in recruitment for IT and software development positions, we will continue to hire for finance and customer service roles too. Employees that are highly skilled in these areas are crucial to the success of our Bulgarian teams. We also continue to actively collaborate with local universities to advertise our internships and junior roles to prospective candidates.
