Here’s to you, our 2020 Rexlabs Award winners
2020 — what a rollercoaster of a year, right? Despite the hurdles and distractions that come with remote work, here at Rexlabs we’ve emerged stronger than ever.
Some members of our staff truly cemented their Rexlabs #legend status last year. Let’s take a moment to celebrate them.
For The Users
Johanna Hagenauer
This award is for our customer champion — the person who is most passionate about our customers and the way we work to improve the lives of the people our products support. Our newly appointed Research and Discovery Lead, Jo, was our well-deserving #ForTheUsers winner for 2020.
Jo is empathetic to our customers and has put an applaudable amount of effort into understanding the challenges that we can solve as a company, in order to improve the customer experience and our relationships with our customers. Advocating for our customers, she has paved the way for other staff to follow in her footsteps through research workshops.
“User research is something I’ve always been passionate about and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to spread this passion across the company. I believe that intently listening to our customer, understanding their problems, their needs and wants makes us not only more compassionate towards them but also better at our job, which is to make their life easier! I’m chuffed that Rexlabs sees the power of user research and has supported me along the way this last year.”
Trending
Tsering Remond
You know those people who join your team, and then a few weeks later you wonder how you ever survived without them? Well, that’s Tsering. He’s our #Trending award winner. This award is for the Rexlabs newcomer who has made the biggest impact, by displaying a constant drive and ownership of their growth.
Tsering started with us in March. Yep, right at the start of the pandemic. He came to the office to meet the team, where he was handed a laptop and then promptly sent packing to work from home. After rebuilding the Rex website, Tsering’s momentum has continued to grow. He’s punched well above his weight, adding value while supporting others to think about new, more scrappy, agile ways to work on their products.
“It’s an amazing feeling to have received the #Trending award after such a mammoth year. It’s really not an award for me, it’s an award for the BAM team. I couldn’t do what I do without the total dream team that I work with every day. It makes it easy to do great work when you’re supported by such talented people that have your back no matter what.”
Real Deal
Siobhan Hokin
The #RealDeal winner is a quintessential legend of our Rexlabs family — a person who has epitomised the Rexlabs culture, our people and our commitment to being the best at what we do throughout 2020.
Our 2020 legend is Siobhan, our favourite artist-come-developer. Siobhan has shown admirable initiative this year, demonstrating consistent leadership by helping steer the team towards a completely new way of working. Her unending enthusiasm for understanding our customers, engaging with the broader business, and doing everything she can to improve the lives of her team members has made her an absolute Rexlabs legend. Plus, her tendency to jazz up our whiteboards with her wonderful drawings makes us all smile.
“It was incredible to feel the support of the Rexlabs team through this award. All I can say is I’ll try and keep it up.”
Here For You
Natasha Harman
This year, we introduced the #HereForYou award for the person who kept the team socially and emotionally connected during a year of lockdowns and remote work. So, of course, this award had to go to our lovely Natasha.
It was an incredibly challenging year for everyone, but imagine stepping into the role of Office Manager when the office is… everywhere. A challenge, to say the least. Since starting as Office Manager late last year, Natasha has organised three Christmas parties, continued our office’s renovation and dealt with every reasonable (and unreasonable) request with absolute poise.
“Winning the #HereForYou award after a year of being very disconnected from each other as a team was really heartwarming. It was wonderful to be recognised for something that I wasn’t really aware I was doing and that it was making such an impact on the people around me.”
Dedicated
Mark Hinkins
This award is for the person who under-promises and over-delivers, both in their behaviour and the results they achieve. Their commitment to Rexlabs is unquestionable. They approach their work with positivity, resilience and accountability, having an exceptional impact on the whole team. They consistently go outside the realms of their role to support others and do the best job possible. In short, they go above and beyond. The winner had to be Mark!
Mark works in our London office, which meant he had to watch us all raise a glass for him from the comfort of his own home, over a morning cuppa — sorry Mark.
“I was really pleased to win the #Dedicated Award! It’s important to me to always work as hard as I can, and be the best I can be. I would say my highlight for the year was my last sale of 2020 (which was also my largest of the year). I had been chasing it down for months, I ran multiple demonstrations to different stakeholders and finally sold a few days before Xmas. It was poignant for me, because the agent I sold to, had surveyed the whole market and viewed demonstrations of all our main competitors. It clearly highlighted to me that moving in to 2021, Rex is the leading CRM in the UK.”
Catalyst
Yvonne Connolly
#Catalyst is our fancy word for leadership. This award is for a person who walks the talk and leads by example, always supporting the greater good of Rexlabs.
At Rexlabs, leadership is about empowerment, individual accountability, hard work and investing above all in your people and your teams. Yvonne has worked tirelessly to coach, encourage and (gently) nudge the Senior Leadership Team to think about the best ways to engage and empower the people that work at Rexlabs. She is always the voice of the team in the room.
As well as leading the People & Culture function, Yvonne has been there to hear concerns, wins, losses, thoughts and observations of all of us. She never hesitates to listen, to step up, to give honest feedback and to challenge you to come to your own best solution.
“I’m passionate about leading and empowering diverse and inclusive teams to give their best. I believe through great leadership, great things happen. This award is lovely recognition of everything I believe in.”
Ripple Effect
Alan Hunter-Willis
This one’s pretty self-explanatory. When one person’s actions are be felt across the entire company — that’s a ripple effect. The winner of this award looks beyond their own genius and focuses their energy on extracting and extending the genius of others.
Alan is our #RippleEffect winner for 2020 — he’s the glue that’s held our product teams together since he started at Rexlabs. In 2020, he continued to empower and help our product teams evolve, to deliver, to build context and engage with our users — all through the lens of a zoom call. He’s had a huge impact on the broader company also, through the rollout of our OKRs, all while eschewing the limelight and pushing others forward to take credit.
“I am in the enviable position of having the opportunity everyday to influence and empower both at a team and company level. Whether it’s helping teams refine and iterate on their approach to managing work and deliverables or designing and implementing a company wide rollout of an OKR framework, it’s incredibly rewarding to be thought of as making a meaningful contribution and humbling to be awarded for it.”
All Blacks
Brand and Marketing team (BAM)
The mighty BAM team doubled in size through 2020, growing from a tiny team of three to six. Yep, that means three new members were onboarded during a pandemic. And boy, did they thrive!
BAM has a big goal (“To be the best marketing resource any Proptech company globally has.”) and last year, they certainly made impressive headway towards it. After being sent to work from home, due to the government-enforced lockdown, BAM battened down the hatches and created a landmark initiative to support current Rex users that broke record customer engagement levels and kept churn static — within two weeks.
Not only that, they launched a new brand, developed five new websites and took every opportunity to come together as a team to creatively solve problems.
“Every day, we are taking big steps to help move the business forward. We know what we need to achieve, we embrace the challenge and we are unapologetically single-minded on delivering the very best job possible on time. We work hard, but we have each others’ backs — no duck gets left behind.”
Congratulations to all our award winners and, as we say at Rexlabs, KUTGW 👍
