A Friendly Guide to Entering the Company Culture Awards

Let’s start with something we believe wholeheartedly: if you’re reading this because you’re proud of the workplace you’ve built, you’re in the right place to celebrate it.

Entering the Company Culture Awards is about pausing, to properly look at the work you do every day to make your workplace a genuinely good place to be and then telling that story out loud. The categories celebrate the flexible policy you fought for, the wellbeing programme you build from scratch and the onboarding process that makes new starters feel like they have arrived somewhere they want to stay.

A Company Culture Award does more than spotlight your work, they operate from the inside out. Teams who feel recognised stay. Candidates weighing up their next move notice who’s winning awards for how they treat people, not just what the service or product they deliver. Clients increasingly want to work with organisations whose values match their own. Entering is one of the most efficient ways we know to retain the people you’ve got and attract the people you want.

So, let’s get you entered and celebrating at the award ceremony.

First, let’s talk categories

This is the bit people tend to overthink, so let’s make it easy.

The best entries almost always start the same way: not with “which category sounds most impressive,” but with “what are we actually proud of?” Pick the initiative, the programme, the team, or the person first, the category will follow naturally.

To help, here’s a tour of where things live.

Mental health, wellbeing and health initiatives is our biggest family of categories, it covers the programmes that get taken for granted. Think Best Workplace Mental Health Awareness Initiative, Best Workplace Health & Wellbeing Initiative, flexible working, employee reward schemes, mentoring, DEIB, remote working, mergers and integrations, employee-led projects, internal comms, and culture transformation itself. If your proudest work sits anywhere near “we changed something for our people and it made a real difference,” start here.

Development & training awards are for anyone investing seriously in growing their people. Here are the learning and development programmes, progression and retention strategies, onboarding and induction, and apprenticeships all live here.

Software & tools awards recognise the tech making culture work happen behind the scenes, think HR platforms and tools that genuinely make reporting, monitoring and praising easier.

Working environment awards are for the physical, remote, or hybrid spaces you’ve built (or reimagined) to support how your people work now, not how offices used to work a decade ago.

Individual awards exist because culture doesn’t happen by accident. It usually happens because someone champions it. Culture Ambassador, HR Professional, ESG or CSR Professional, and the Leadership Award are all here to recognise the people behind the progress.

Team awards are the big celebratory categories. Culture Team of the Year, Most Innovative Culture, Best Team Culture, Best HR Team, B-Corp Company of the Year, and the ever-popular Best Company (or Agency) to Work For, split by size so you’re always up against comparable peers.

A few honest tips on choosing:

• Don’t enter just one. If you’ve got the evidence, entering across a few relevant categories is completely normal and often the smartest approach.
• Don’t force it. A strong entry squeezed into the wrong category rarely lands as well as a modest entry in exactly the right one. Match the story to the category, not the other way round.
• Still not sure? That’s what we’re here for. Have a browse of the full category descriptions, or drop the team a message there’s no wrong door, and we’d genuinely rather point you in the right direction than have you guess.

Email [email protected]

How to enter

Once you’ve got your categories sorted, the process itself is refreshingly simple:

1. Download the entry kit for full details on what’s needed for your chosen category.
2. Fill in the entry form and tell us your story: the challenge, what you did about it, and the impact it’s had.
3. Add your supporting evidence. This might be data, testimonials, screen shots, or all three, whatever brings your entry to life.
4. Submit before the deadline; our panel of experts will then determine a shortlist and winner.

That’s it.

What judges are looking for

If there’s one thing that separates a good entry from a great one, it’s this: judges want evidence, not adjectives. Anyone can say their team is happy. Show them how you know.

That means:

• Real numbers, wherever you can include retention rates, engagement scores, participation figures, before-and-after comparisons.
• Real voices. Staff testimonials carry enormous weight. Let your people speak for themselves.
• A clear story arc. Where did you start, what you did, and what changed because of it.
• Honesty is always key. The entries that stand out are specific, human, and a little bit imperfect because that’s what real culture work actually looks like.

Why it’s worth it?

Don’t just take our word for it. Past entrants have described the process as a genuinely worthwhile a moment of reflection in its own right.

Outsourced Events

“Winning the Leadership Award is a proud moment for everyone at Outsourced Events. For us, the recognition reflects years of trust, investment and a shared belief in building a business centred around people, partnership and long-term relationships. It also provided an opportunity to step back and reflect on the culture we have built together and the role it has played in shaping the business today.”

Funnel Fuel

“We developed FunnelFuel’s Culture programme with the single vision of contributing to making the business a truly great place to work. Being shortlisted for these awards means so much to us and to our wider committee, it’s a meaningful recognition of everyone’s hard work and dedication. We’re incredibly proud of the culture we’ve created together and even prouder to see it continue to grow and thrive.”

A last word of encouragement

Big or small, agency or in-house, five people or five hundred, see this as your invitation. If your culture turns heads and lifts hearts internally, it deserves the chance to do the same externally.

So have a browse of the categories, pick the stories you’re proudest to tell, and let’s celebrate what you’ve achieved.