International Women's Day 2023

In our post last year, we talked of our desire to diversify our workforce and provide more flexibility in order to attract staff with a more varied set of skills and experiences. Since then, we have hired three new staff – all of whom happen to be women. They are all at varying stages of their professional development, have come to us from London, Spain, and Dorset, and all have varying degrees of flexibility in their working patterns.

Now, five of our 14-strong team are female, as are 50% of our senior management.

We’ve gained a colleague with valuable photography and cinematography skills alongside her architectural abilities. We’ve hired an architectural assistant who is undertaking her education through one of the new government-funded apprentice schemes, and is already demonstrating to us the vast benefits of this new way of learning – we get fresh new talent with energy and new ideas, whilst being able to help mould a future architect, without worrying about losing her when she returns to university after just 1 year’s placement. We’ve also employed an experienced senior architect who brings a wealth of knowledge in precisely the sector we need, which has previously proven very difficult for us to find down here in Hampshire.

This growth in knowledge and skillset is part of our journey that we have been taking over the last 2 years, enabling us to restructure so that we can offer more flexible support across the business; with the right team, anyone can be in the role of a project lead, from an Architectural Assistant to the Director.

As part of the restructure and growth, Nicky has been heavily involved with our external business consultant which has allowed her to develop her role and has since been promoted to Managing Director. This allows her to be dedicated to running the practice to ensure the business thrives, it allows Magnus and the team to focus on design and improves the office performance and culture.

The office may have grown by 3 members of staff this year and evolved, but what we’ve gained through their more diverse range of abilities and experience, is far more important.

The skills and insight that each member of our team brings is invaluable to us as a business, and as people. The broader the range of diversity, the greater the abundance of knowledge we can draw upon will be.