When Richard Reed, Jon Wright and Adam Balon founded Innocent Drinks, all they had to be good at was making smoothies. Eight years on, they’re still good at making smoothies and, with a team of 120, Innocent has recently been voted a top employer by the Guardian.
The leap from three-man start-up to internationally respected employer of choice has been a rewarding challenge for Innocent’s founders, who believe that it’s not so much what they do but who they employ that makes all the difference.
Learning to become a good employer is one of the organic developments that characterise the Innocent approach to business, which eschews the formalities of corporate life in favour of a more informal, natural progression of ideas, experience and learning.
But Innocent has not become an employer of choice by chance. A deep-seated respect for talent and skill in every area of company life has led the Innocent management team to develop (however unplanned) a positive, modern and democratic approach to employee relations.
From an outsider’s perspective, it seems as though Innocent develops its workforce by simply cherry-picking the talented individuals who present themselves at the gates, rather than by filling specific gaps in its commercial operations.
In reality, it’s a combination of the two, as Head of Creative Dan Germain explains: ‘We hire as many smart, clever people as we can find room for. We hire people who are experts in their field, be that recruitment, ethical procurement, web design or anything else.’ In doing this, Germain believes that a good attitude towards employees comes naturally. ‘If you have truly inspiring and motivated people around you, you can do anything – learn to be better managers, learn to be better at business.’
Innocent’s own appraisal of its abilities as an employer creates a bit of a chicken and egg scenario: which came first, the inspiring people or the inspiring workplace? The answer is probably blurred in company history, but nevertheless, the result is a talent-rich environment, which encourages creativity, communication and the democratisation of innovation and which has enabled Innocent to become the fastest growing food and drinks company in the UK today.
