Why Work at Flooid?

A collaborative culture, cutting-edge innovation and endless opportunity to shape the future of retail… who wouldn’t want to be part of that?

Diane Palmquist, joined Flooid as CEO – North America and Group co-CEO, in May 2020. Here Diane tells us more about working at Flooid.

Diane, what brought you to Flooid?

The momentum. I’ve worked in technology and product marketing for two decades, and sometimes you see businesses ‘rest up’ because they’ve got a great client base or their technology had good adoption and they’ve got regular licensing income. But then you see a company like PCMS completely reshape itself to become Flooid and serve the next phase of retail, and you think: this is a future-focused business. It was exciting, and I could see the traction Flooid was gaining from the deals it made with Hudson and others, particularly in North America. So that was why I joined.

Can you tell us about the Flooid workforce?

We’re a truly global company. Our solutions are used in more than 60 countries, and trusted by massive enterprises in the USA, Canada, UK & Ireland, South Africa, Australia and Continental Europe.

We’ve got a great mix of people, from high-potential graduates to retail veterans with more than three decades in the industry. We’ve worked really hard on diversity, particularly encouraging women into the business and into leadership roles.

Our workforce is primarily based out of Cincinnati, Ohio and Coventry, UK, but we have salespeople in Africa, Asia and other emerging markets. As I write this we have 350 people working directly for Flooid. But of course we’re growing fast, so we’re always looking for talented people to get in touch with their résumés.

Why do you like working at Flooid?

The best part about working at Flooid is I get to work every single day with very creative, highly technical and innovative people. We get to build great technology, working with minds who think very quickly, who bring things to market very fast. It’s really exciting to work at a company that is changing the industry.

What’s the culture like?

Our values are Innovative, Customer-focused, Transparent, Collaborative and Empowered, and we live them – not just from the top-down but from the bottom-up. All of our company leaders are very open, and very approachable — we know we don’t have all the answers, which is why we hire bright, creative, motivated people.

As a leadership group we try to set a culture for the business. We want our business to be open, and full of creativity. The rebrand to Flooid has helped that, and we’ve adopted real-time internal communications tools and started having lots of fun with Hackathon days and more community events. We’re focused on attracting and retaining talent; we know we need the best people, so we have to compete on the employee experience.

One other thing that unites us all is our passion for retail. You couldn’t work here if you weren’t interested in the nature of retail and shopping habits.

How has Covid impacted Flooid employees?

Because so much of our business is global, we were already working in an agile, remote way through tools like Microsoft Teams, which we’d adopted well ahead of the pandemic.

Then the pandemic hit and we’ve found our workload has gone through the roof, because of the need to accelerate projects like mobile point of sale and self-checkout and the massive acceleration to online and new customer journey types. We were already working on projects like this for the majority of our customers, but now we’ve learned how to do things much quicker. So not only have we helped retailers become more agile, we have become more agile ourselves.

Video calls have proven a great way to still deliver excellent client service. A lot of us really missed the normal face-to-face interaction at NRF, but our Vantage Point videos proved a really popular way to talk shop with old friends and new faces in an engaging format.

How has Covid impacted Flooid’s customers?

It’s been quite a ride. From lockdown to social distancing to many customers no longer wanting to spend any or much time in-store or deal with a cashier, retailers have had to deal with a generation’s worth of change in a few months. We like to feel we’ve supported them with that, and in many cases we’ve shown that projects can be achieved much, much quicker.

Our client base has fared very differently. We’re really strong in grocery and pharmacy, and work with global leaders in those verticals. They’ve had to work hard on contactless, and in some cases curbside service, and of course scaling delivery services, but if anything Covid has had a positive impact on revenues. But then you have non-essential retail that has struggled more with store closures, although they have seen some silver linings such as higher conversion rates when they do open physical or online stores.

Technology has played a key role. Because we’re relatively mature with cloud and automation and other partners our clients have been able to flex more than competitors. That pits them in a good place for the coming months.

What’s next?

The pandemic hasn’t slowed our growth. But remote working has widened our talent pool. So we’ll continue to attract the best people, develop them, free them to innovate, and learn from each other. And have fun. Flooid wouldn’t be Flooid without the fun.

If you’re interested in working at Flooid, visit our Careers page.