Empowerment and purpose: How UK fintech Wise ensures its staff want to stay

Empowering employees to address customers’ problems instills in them a sense of responsibility and ownership. According to Isabel Naidoo, Chief People Officer at Wise, a global platform for moving and managing money across borders, this is key to employee retention.

Wise has mastered the art of charming potential hires and making recruits feel at home. Over the past three years, it has hired over 1,500 people, taking its total headcount above 6,500. Naidoo has witnessed this growth at first hand, having joined the business in 2022.

The company’s staff (known internally as “Wisers”) represent 124 nationalities and work across 11 major locations. “Nearly half of our employees work in a country different from their nationality,” explains Naidoo. “I’m one of these people with international roots, as my mother is from Southern Europe. It’s nice to work in an environment where your people are as diverse as our customer base.”

Unlike more traditional workplaces, where job specs dictate which tasks employees undertake, Wisers are given the choice of which customer problems they focus on within their remit. If they successfully identify an issue, they are given the freedom to analyze and fix it.

“It’s a really nice way to think about your work,” says Naidoo, “Irrespective of which function you work in, empowerment unleashes people to thrive and causes them to stay at the organization.”

But real empowerment demands a lot more than simply granting permission for certain activities and approaches. Staff need the tools to effect change, as well as access to the business data required to diagnose an issue accurately. Work patterns must be flexible, allowing individuals to work on multiple projects simultaneously.

Companies also need the agility to put together, at speed, multi-skilled teams to address specific problems. Naidoo is keen to stress that empowering employees does not necessarily mean asking them to work in isolation. “There’s a misconception that software developers need to work by themselves,” she says. “Actually, our work, especially in the technology team, is highly collaborative.”