Looking back to 2024

The year 2024 was a year of change for us in HR. Office moves, new training initiatives, as well as the introduction of additional benefits - we tackled it all last year. Let's take a look together at what went well (and what we're still tweaking)!
We kicked off the new year with a challenging task - moving the majority of the company to new premises. We are based at the Faculty of Informatics at MUNI and from smaller offices, most of the company moved to a large open sleeping room on the 7th floor - with a beautiful view of the whole of Brno! It was challenging at the beginning of the year, everyone was getting used to the new space and it took us much longer than expected to fully settle in. Even now, at the beginning of 2025, we are fine-tuning the last details.

After settling in to the new space, we sent out a satisfaction survey to our colleagues to get even more suggestions for improvement and give them the space to express them. We took great care with the evaluation and presentation of the results and linked them to our goals for what we would like to change during the year. 58 per cent of people completed the survey. So what did we achieve during the year?

We want to learn!

Lack of professional growth, more room for learning, internal training sessions. These were the most pressing topics that our people were not happy with. We wanted to respond as flexibly as possible, so just a few months after presenting the results from the survey, we organized our first internal DEV talk - a one-hour talk from CTO Milan - this is another new feature for 2024, as Milan is taking on the role of CTO from January 2024. Dev Talks so far have been on Microsoft Azure and Web Vitals - topics that employees have voted on themselves, they also come up with ideas on what they would like to hear. It's an easy way to motivate colleagues to learn more - this talk also addresses real problems that can arise on projects.

Meet outside the office

But it's not just about professional development - building and maintaining our relationships is just as important. And it's our company events that show what a great bunch we have at Bluesoft. In 2024, we've organised 18 company events, whether they're our stalwarts like a barbecue, a tennis tournament this time combined with a company anniversary, a Christmas party, a beer tasting or a company quiz and cocktail day in the office. There are also company breakfasts where we try to give all the information from the teams and they take place three to four times a year. For the first time we also tried boating on the Brno dam.

Some new benefits

Companies are coming up with more and more benefits for employees, and we've added a few in the last year. We are now offering a discounted mobile plan for employees and their loved ones, we supply colleagues with healthy goodies from the snack bar (although sometimes the faculty cafeteria can also be used), we have introduced a reward after 5 and 10 years of service in the company and a reward for client referrals.

How can I find out about new developments in the company?

Colleagues also wanted to be much more informed about news in the company - about incoming people, outgoing people and when to wish colleagues on their birthdays when a treat appears unexpectedly in the kitchen. Together with marketing, we created a newsletter that we send to the company once a month. In it, colleagues can find information and photos from previous events, invitations to future events, who is celebrating a birthday the following month or who is joining us as a new colleague. In addition to improving communication across the company, we've been working on setting up regular 1:1 meetings with team leaders. The meeting with the team leader remains a once a year meeting with HR.

And what awaits us in 2025?

There are definitely things that didn't go 100% last year that we are still working on - like more clarity in the use of the education budget and how to incorporate that budget into our internal systems. Also, some required benefits were not implemented last year. But I'm sure we'll enjoy 2025 together, because the collective, smart and friendly people we meet every day at work are the biggest motivation for most of us and the reason we love this job so much.