Radius voted a winner in the Sunday Times “Best Places to Work 2026”

I’m really pleased to be able to share that this weekend Radius was named as one of the winners in the Sunday Times “Best Places to Work 2026” awards. Before I go on, I would just like to thank everyone that contributed to us getting this accolade, as I know that all the daily pressures and strains in a growing company like ours means there are a lot of tough days in every year alongside the more rewarding ones.

As I came to writing the final chapters of my new book “It’s Not Rocket Science”, one penny that took far too many years to drop in my own development, is that you can’t simply recruit your way to success when you want to scale a business across multiple sectors and geographies. It is probably only 6 or 7 years ago now, that we began to invest significantly more time and money in improving both the quality of young people we take on, as well as into our own internal program of how to give them the best possible experience and mentorship in their early years, so that they can hopefully develop to become our leaders of the future. Thankfully, the program has expanded and improved every year as we have learnt what works well and what doesn’t and we now have a growing group of sub-thirty year olds, across all our divisions and global offices that are already contributing to a genuine step change in the performance of Radius.

Alongside this investment in talent, we are also moving to a more modern office infrastructure, with improved facilities and overall working environment. A new Telematics Hub at Arden Square in Crewe (with a Star Wars theme!) leads the way as our most futuristic example of this move and in the last couple of years we have upgraded or opened new locations in Caldas da Rainha, Valencia, Atlanta, Auckland, Milan, Galway, Dublin, Ronse, Leeds and Ipswich with Berlin, Essen and Melbourne planned for the year ahead.

Two of the 25 lessons in my book “Never stop learning” and “Work from the office” are very relevant to this Sunday Times award, as we can see it is critical for our young people to be in the office, close to their colleagues and mentors as well as regularly travelling to our international locations if they are going to learn the skills they need to maximise their potential. You can find some of these lessons here. One specific thing we have really picked up on in the last couple of years, is the value of going on a job rotation away from our Campus in Crewe. This year we are increasing the number of these assignments dramatically by doubling this specific population from 10 to 20 people with some lucky individuals having 12 months or more in Kuala Lumpur or Melbourne.

I do feel that the home working “nirvana” that is frequently peddled by politicians of all persuasions who have little or no knowledge of how a real business works is a significant problem building that will come back to bite us over the next decade. When some of the younger generation of talent start to realise that they are missing out on promotions due to their lack of experience, especially the critical one of people management and end up being treated more like contractors than employees, I am not sure that it will feel quite like the perfect career they had been promised. As an aside, I don’t think either, that they will then be voting to help their companies win any Best Places to Work awards. Hopefully, if we keep improving our program, where we want to bring a little interest as well as some fun to working life, we can stay near the top in the years ahead !