At Egen, we are one team. We know that when people feel seen, they show up differently. This philosophy drives our people-first culture of empathy, inclusion, and growth. Our commitment is validated by our people: 93% agree our HR policy is communicated effectively and strengthens our culture.

A cornerstone of this mission is our India People Council. This platform empowers our Egeneers to voice ideas, bridges communication gaps for our remote workforce, and drives career advancement.

We live diversity through Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that foster genuine belonging. Currently, 93% of our people agree that individual differences — such as gender, ethnicity, or age — do not affect how they are treated. Through “deep listening” and targeted initiatives like unconscious bias awareness and self-reflection sessions for women, we make inclusion personal and practical. We also prioritize total well-being through wellness webinars and mandated breaks, resulting in 94% of our people affirming equal growth opportunities between women and men.

What makes Egen, Egen?

We invest significantly in continuous learning and professional growth. Our commitment ensures 100% of people are entitled to receive training, a priority reflected in our high participation rate of over 85% engagement with learning campaigns. We move beyond standard offerings by personalizing learning plans for individuals in different groups, ensuring development is targeted and relevant. Our programs are structured around Learning plans that categorize development into essential tech skills—spanning cloud, data, platforms, and AI technologies—and critical life skills. Our people have access to earn certification programs and technical training, enabling our teams to deepen their expertise while staying ahead of industry advancements.

The technology industry continues to evolve rapidly, creating both exciting opportunities and complex workforce challenges. One of the most significant challenges is attracting and retaining highly skilled AI and engineering talent in an increasingly competitive global environment.

Another key challenge is ensuring that people continuously evolve their skills as new technologies emerge. With rapid advancements in AI, cloud platforms, and data engineering. Organizations must build strong learning ecosystems that help professionals stay relevant and innovative. To address this turbulence, organizations must be proactive in resource preparedness to safeguard people's interests and maintain stability.

At the same time, maintaining a strong culture of collaboration and belonging in hybrid and distributed work environments requires thoughtful leadership and intentional engagement.

At Egen, collaboration and a sense of belonging are central to our “one-team" culture. We foster these values through several key initiatives, beginning with the India People Council. As a cornerstone of our engagement strategy, this platform is designed to empower people to voice ideas and concerns, effectively and bridge communication gaps and ensuring that everyone—particularly those in remote roles—feels heard and connected.

We also believe in bringing people together through shared experiences that go beyond their day-to-day work. Throughout the year, we organize cultural celebrations, engagement activities, and friendly sports tournaments. These events, alongside regular team meetups, encourage meaningful interaction across different teams and locations, building a stronger social fabric within the company.

Shared growth remains a top priority, which is why we host frequent learning sessions where people share knowledge and build new skills together. Furthermore, our CSR initiatives—including environmental clean-ups and community volunteering—allow our team members to collaborate while contributing to meaningful social causes, reinforcing our collective impact on society.

To make inclusion a personal and lived experience, we facilitate “Self-Reflection & Self-Awareness" sessions for our people and conduct awareness programs on unconscious bias. These efforts ensure that every individual feels valued and included, providing a supportive environment that is further rounded out by our comprehensive wellness initiatives designed to support our team's holistic well-being.

Egen is proud to be recognized among the Best Places to Work in India for 2025! We are thrilled to rank #2 in Top Workplaces India 2025 and #3 in Top Workplaces APAC 2025, achieving an overall employee experience score of 86%.

This recognition is a powerful testament to the culture we have built together at Egen.

Certification is an opportunity for honest reflection. The most valuable insights come from truly listening to your people. By placing people at the center of your strategy—investing in development, inclusion, and transparency—you create an environment where everyone can succeed together.

At FRIME, engagement is cultivated through everyday actions. We encourage open dialogue and transparency, ensuring employees are informed, involved, and confident in their roles.

We place strong importance on development by offering ongoing training opportunities that help employees strengthen their capabilities and advance professionally.

Supporting our people also means caring for their wellbeing. That’s why we provide access to health and wellbeing consultations for employees and their immediate families, helping them maintain a healthy balance between work and personal life.

Our internship program also plays a strategic role in bringing in new talent, offering young professionals hands-on experience and a pathway to long-term careers within FRIME.

The seafood and food processing sector presents ongoing HR challenges, particularly when it comes to attracting and retaining talent in operational environments. Competition for skilled workers and evolving workforce expectations require organizations to remain agile and proactive.

Another key challenge lies in maintaining high levels of engagement across diverse teams, while ensuring a unified and cohesive culture.

At FRIME, we respond to these challenges by focusing on people-driven strategies that prioritize development, inclusion, and employee satisfaction.

At FRIME, collaboration is essential to how we operate. We actively encourage employees to work together, share knowledge, and build strong professional relationships.

Our approach includes:

• Cross-functional initiatives that bring teams together
• Team-building activities that reinforce collaboration and trust
• Company-wide actions that align employees around shared objectives
• Recognition and social initiatives that highlight achievements and strengthen connections

These initiatives contribute to a workplace where teamwork thrives and employees feel part of a supportive and connected community.

Achieving the Best Place to Work certification for three consecutive years is a testament to FRIME’s ongoing commitment to its people.

This experience has provided valuable insights into employee perspectives, helping us better understand what drives engagement and satisfaction. It has also enabled us to continuously refine our approach and strengthen our workplace culture.

For FRIME, this recognition is both an achievement and a reminder to keep progressing and innovating in how we support our employees.

Organizations considering this journey should approach it with honesty and a true willingness to listen.

Understanding employee feedback and turning it into meaningful action is key to building trust and long-term engagement.

Creating a great workplace is not about reaching a fixed goal—it is about continuously evolving and ensuring that people remain at the center of the organization.

At ECC Group, we see employee engagement as a continuous journey rather than a one-time initiative. We actively promote open communication, transparency, and trust, ensuring that employees feel comfortable sharing ideas, feedback, and perspectives.

Our People & Culture department plays a central role in creating programs and initiatives that support employee empowerment, collaboration, and wellbeing. We believe that when employees feel supported both professionally and personally, they are more motivated, creative, and committed to organizational success.

We also focus on creating a workplace where employees have opportunities to grow, take ownership, and develop their capabilities. At the same time, we prioritize employee wellness through initiatives that encourage healthy lifestyles, team bonding, and a balanced work environment.

Ultimately, our goal is to create a culture where people feel connected to the organization’s purpose, supported in their development, and proud to be part of ECC Group.

Like many organizations operating in fast-evolving industries, one of the most pressing HR challenges we face is attracting and retaining highly skilled talent, particularly in specialized commercial, marketing, scientific, and digital roles.

At the same time, the pace of regulatory developments and market changes requires organizations to continuously invest in skills development, agile workforce planning, and leadership capability building.

Another important challenge is maintaining high employee engagement and wellbeing in performance-driven environments. As organizations grow and evolve, it becomes essential to ensure that employees feel supported, have clear career pathways, and experience a healthy balance between performance expectations and personal wellbeing.

At ECC Group, we address these challenges through a people-centered approach that combines development, engagement, and wellbeing initiatives while fostering strong leadership and organizational culture.

At ECC Group, we strongly believe that building strong teams requires creating opportunities for employees to connect beyond their daily responsibilities.

Some of our recent initiatives include:

2025

• Highest Steps Challenge
• Christmas Celebration
• Hatrick Champions Initiative
• Corporate Massages and wellness sessions

2026

• Step-Up n Go’ 2026 Challenge
• Kickoora football tournament

Our journey with the Best Places to Work certification has been an extremely valuable experience for ECC Group. It gave us the opportunity to listen more closely to our employees and gain deeper insights into their expectations, experiences, and engagement levels.

The certification process provided meaningful data-driven insights into our workplace culture, leadership effectiveness, and employee satisfaction. It helped us identify what we are doing well while also guiding us toward areas where we can further enhance the employee experience.

For us, this journey reaffirmed that building a great workplace is not about a single recognition, but about a continuous commitment to improvement, employee wellbeing, and a strong people-first culture.

My advice to organizations considering the Best Places to Work certification is to approach the process with authenticity and openness.

This journey should be seen as an opportunity to genuinely listen to employees and understand what truly matters to them. Organizations that succeed are those that translate employee feedback into concrete actions and long-term cultural improvements.

Ultimately, the most important factor is to embed people-centric values into everyday leadership and organizational practices. When organizations invest sincerely in their people, they naturally build workplaces where employees feel engaged, supported, and motivated to succeed.

The goal of achieving the Best Places to Work certification was set a number of years ago as part of a wider strategic program of work aimed at re-establishing Motor Distributors Limited as a multi brand distributor in the Irish motor industry. It was on that journey that we learned that an engaged employee isn’t just someone who is happy at work. They need to have a deeper sense of purpose and they need to understand why their individual contribution matters and why they come to work every day. Staff need to be connected to the brands that they represent.

We developed an understanding of how our leaders interacted with and were seen within the business and from that information, we set about making the shift from a management mindset to a mentorship mindset. We asked our Leaders to provide the what and the why, and then give our employees the autonomy to decide how best to do their jobs.

We set about immediately improving how we communicate with the business, we naturally invested in technology to help support that aim but we found that open, transparent and fearless communication was really what our staff wanted and we now host regular "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) sessions and town hall forums with all of the senior leadership team to ensure that information flows freely and that every employee knows and understands the business.

Finally, we saw that real and lasting engagement is fuelled by progress and achievement whether that’s personal or professional. We significantly expanded our internal learning and development offering and we engaged with every employee about their development needs. We now offer and support personal and professional development paths, ensuring every team member sees a future for themselves with MDL.

At the end of 2025, we had seen a significant increase in the number of employees being successful in promotion opportunities, we have seen a 64% reduction in voluntary turnover and employee referrals are now a consistent source of candidates seeking to work with us.

When your staff are telling their friends and family that this is a good place to work, then you know you are on the right path.

There are obviously a lot of challenges in the modern HR space, but for me the two most pressing challenges are:

Finding and retaining talent: As our business and indeed the wider industry evolves, the need for specialised and industry-specific skills is higher than ever. Because the talent pipeline is shrinking, we are exploring how we shift our traditional focus of hiring for skills to hiring for cultural fit and attitude. We can then rely on our internal training structure and succession planning programs to bridge that gap.

Holistic Wellbeing: Moving to address the mental and emotional health of your workforce should be a major priority in an increasingly stressful landscape. At a recent wellbeing talk, we got some feedback from staff saying that while gym sessions, runs and yoga are great, not everyone is comfortable or capable of doing them and some people have challenges that go beyond physical fitness. The message was clear - employees' expectations of the workplace are changing. The area of mental health is a real and growing challenge that we are seeing and the positive in that message is that we have created an environment where staff feel safer speaking out and saying “I’m not Ok”

Do it and don’t be fearful of the feedback. I have always operated on the belief that if you care, then you will be curious. If you ask people for their views and opinions then it’s important that you do something with that information. If you invest your time creating the environment where staff feel safe to tell you what its like for them then that is invaluable information to have. My reflections on the Best Places to Work journey would be:

• Listen Before You Act: Don't wait for the certification survey to ask your employees how they feel. Start the conversation now so that the certification when it hopefully comes, becomes a celebration of your progress, not a discovery of your problems.
• Be Vulnerable: If the survey results show areas of improvement, share them with the staff. Showing that you are aware of and willing to work on the low scores builds more trust.
• Focus on your staff, not on the award: Certification is the output of a strong culture, not the cause of it. If you focus on making your employees, feel valued, safe, and challenged then the rewards and awards will follow.

Engagement at Nevvon is rooted in trust, transparency, and ownership. As a distributed organization, we are intentional about creating clear operating rhythms and open channels for communication. We rely heavily on collaborative tools like Slack – not just for execution – but for dialogue, idea-sharing, and connection across teams.

We hold a weekly, company-wide meeting that serves as an open forum for sharing updates, surfacing questions, and reinforcing alignment around priorities. Leadership encourages participation at every level, and employees are empowered within their respective
departments to identify opportunities for improvement, propose solutions, and make meaningful contributions that shape how we work.

Our leadership culture is built on the belief that people do their best work when they understand the “why,” feel heard, and are trusted to act. That philosophy shows up in how we manage, how we collaborate, and how we grow together.

One of the most significant challenges we face, as both a company and an industry, is identifying and attracting the right talent. At Nevvon, the ideal candidate sits at the intersection of technical skill and genuine passion for caregiving and healthcare impact. Finding that balance requires thoughtful recruitment and a clear articulation of purpose.

Operating as a fully remote organization also presents challenges. Without daily in-person interaction, building connection and shared identity requires creativity and consistency. We’ve learned that engagement doesn’t happen by accident; it must be designed, supported, and revisited as the company evolves.

We’re proud of how we’ve addressed these challenges by investing in culture, communication, and leadership practices that keep our team connected and aligned, even across time zones and continents.

We place a strong emphasis on creating opportunities for connection that are both meaningful and enjoyable. These include virtual office yoga and movement breaks, themed mixer events with structured activities and breakout rooms, and special events and remote office parties designed to bring the team together in unexpected ways.

We also foster informal connection through Slack-based interest groups – from sports fans to food enthusiasts – as well as office pools, birthday celebrations, and public recognition on our #celebrations channel. Job shadowing opportunities allow employees to better understand how different teams operate, strengthening cross-functional empathy and collaboration.

When possible, we also support periodic in-person gatherings for team members who live in close proximity, most often in Toronto and New York City. While small in scale, these moments reinforce the relationships that make our remote culture work.

As Nevvon has grown – from a small founding team to 50 employees and now to nearly 100 – our leadership team has remained deeply committed to hiring thoughtfully and intentionally. The core of Nevvon’s success lies in its people: hardworking, high-integrity individuals whose values align closely with the ambition and dedication of our founders, CEO James Cohen and COO Tal Arad.

The Best Places to Work certification was both validating and affirming. It reflected what we strive to build every day: an environment where people feel trusted, challenged, supported, and connected to a mission that matters.

Our advice centers on two things: creativity and culture.

First, creativity – especially for remote organizations. Engagement doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does have to be intentional. Finding ways to connect people that are authentic, inclusive, and fun goes a long way in building trust and morale.

Second, a culture grounded in self-reflection and accountability. At Nevvon, we don’t cling to the status quo simply because it’s comfortable. We regularly examine how well we are living our values and where we can improve. That commitment to continuous growth – paired with clear ownership – has been essential to our success.

When creativity and accountability work together, culture becomes something that evolves naturally rather than something that needs to be enforced.