Béa Fertility

Béa Fertility has been a great place to learn amongst a team of talented and supportive people. The team is small so there are opportunities to learn from people outside of your department, and everyone is happy to share their work. They really focus on career progression and helping you develop the skills you need.

The team are friendly and open. There's opportunities to socialise, both in and out of work. Everyone is supportive and eager to help you progress. Management are great at listening and taking on board your comments.

Béa is very flexible, some people work in the office full-time, others work from home full-time, and some do a mixture. You can work remotely without any issues, and management ensure that this is possible for you. They are flexible with schedules and out of work committments.

I'm working on internal and external operations at Béa Fertility. Right now that means building out our supply chain to get our devices into customers hands for our launch date as well as internal operations such as developing our employee benefits, process improvements, or building culture. Béa is a very bottoms-up culture with a flat hierarchy and everyone gets a say (the banter is real). We have daily stand-ups to coordinate on work-streams and keep people informed on progress as well as bi-weekly company progress/big-picture updates owned by different stakeholders regardless of seniority status every time. We operate in a hybrid (no presenteeism) culture. This is a high trust culture around getting our work done and being accountable to others. Management use a very empowering and inspiring leadership style to align everyone on vision and plans but leave it up to us to figure out how that gets done. What I most appreciate though, is there is a no-blame culture here. In my 3rd and 4th weeks at the company we were going through a sprint where I had 3 deliverables. One of them was a pretty big one but I didn't realise how much work it was going to be and how long it was going to take. So I had not completed this task for the end of our sprint. Instead of chastising me my manager wanted to reinforce that we are all figuring things out and we are all taking on things outside of our wheel house and so when things don't go to plan we want to learn from them and how we can improve for the future. Lastly, and this goes often times unsaid, but we are all super passionate about the problems we are trying to solve and take very seriously the impact we will have. There is a lot of intentional thought behind what we do and how we operate and we are encouraged to bubble up if we find out later we are not.

Schools people have gone to and companies people have worked for aside. I was super impressed when I talked to our the founders in the interview process about their understanding of the customer needs and journey that our targeted customers are going through and how we want to add value for them. This not only included the innovative ways they found that information but the inferences they were able to make from it and how we have synthesised that for our use case.

As I said earlier I think this in a large part comes from a no-blame culture. However, I think there is a certain element of vulnerability embedded in how we communicate from people because even the founders are willing to put their hand up and say that something didn't get done that should have or they dropped the ball on something. This doesn't happen often but the fact that this type of behaviour is seen from top management and is therefore 'ok' is major because it means we bubble things up faster and are quicker to proactively solve them together. Also people are less likely to internalise mistakes and get on with where we can impact things. Moreover, whenever we do our sprint planning my manager is very intentional about a) making sure we aren't over capacity (and taking stuff off if we are) and b) really pushing us to think about whether everything we have put on our plate has to get done so we can prioritise the big rocks and what actually matters.

Love the team energy at Béa. Everyone is supportive, creative and focused! We're all open to new ideas and help each other deliver a product and service to our customers.

The company values employees and cares about our wellbeing. This is reflected in an ethos of a flexible working environment to avoid burnout and regular catch ups to see how we are and what we may need.

Béa has a flexible working environment which allows for early or late starts as long as we work our hours.

The leadership team in place is filled with experts in their areas who are committed to supporting the team, trying different ways of working and above all setting a clear strategy and goals that the entire company works towards as a team. The co-founders Tess (CEO) and George (CPO) in particular have led the team through great example and clear communication.

Users, the families, are genuinely at the core of everything Béa does. Knowing that our work will directly help people start families and increase the options available for families regardless of what they look like is a great motivator.

The attention to my career and professional development started even before I had received an offer to join the Béa team. The support to learn and grow is in place, including getting to do things you have never done before.