Join Us | Oxford

As a B Corp, we are strongly values-led. Our values represent what matters to us as an organisation, and the way we are committed to behave with each other and with our clients. We want to work with people who share our values – who are looking for meaning in their work, who welcome stretch and challenge, who think and act flexibly, who are committed to fairness for all, and who love to laugh! And we want our people to stay with us – we have very low turnover because we do all we can to ensure our people are happy.

Our job is to crack really tough challenges, with our clients. Whether we’re building strategy, developing marketing excellence or driving change, we create solutions that stick.

If their challenges were easy, they wouldn’t need to call us! We need big and original thinkers. People who find new and different ways to break down issues, understand problems, find solutions and tell stories. We are committed to building an ever-more diverse community with varied backgrounds, lived experiences, and points of view on the world.

Our value of Fairness is strongly connected to Equity and Inclusion. We function as one team, with minimal hierarchy and maximum transparency. Although we are all based at home and our climate commitment means that we avoid unnecessary travel, we work hard to include everyone through connections and communications. We have an active Wellbeing programme, with a strong focus on mental health. Our monthly Happiness Survey ensures that we know how the community is feeling, and can pick up on opportunities for improvement.

What does that mean?

Everyone who works in our team brings skills and expertise. Our consultants have all been in senior client-side roles, so we really understand our clients and their issues. Our Visual and Learning Designers are experts at bringing the thinking to life, telling stories with visuals, and delivering learning experiences. We don’t have juniors behind the scenes – everyone you meet and work with at Oxford, knows what they are talking about!

To bring together a team of this quality, we have to be fully flexible in our approach. Great talents could be based anywhere in the world, so we don’t have an office you have to live near. And many people with exceptional expertise want to work part-time, or as independent freelancers – so we’ve created a structure and culture that welcomes everyone.

For instance, around half of our Staff work part-time, including five of our Board members. And we also have a large cohort of freelancers – we call them our Associates – who choose to bring their expertise to our project teams and clients. Working flexibly and treated as ‘one team’ with our staff, our Associates are able to maintain their independence whilst benefitting from being part of a bigger organisation, and working on projects that need a range of experience and challenge.

Our staff benefit from having access to brilliant colleagues with a diverse skill set.

And our clients get the best people to crack their challenges.

FAQs

One of B Corp’s five areas is ‘workers’, which assesses how far your policies and practices are designed for the good of your team. In our 2023 recertification we scored 39 for ‘workers’, and we were credited as ‘Best for the World’ (ie in top 5% of scores). Many of the B Corp principles have been our ways of working for over 30 years, especially the focus on flexibility, transparency and personal development. We’ve also learned from our fellow B Corps and focused on elements like our Wellbeing Programme.

For every project, we bring together the people with the right skills and passions, expertise and energy for the challenge. We will always find the right people from our community, wherever they are in the world, mixing staff and associates. Typically, a project team is four to five people, with other ‘guest experts’ as needed. The team will remain together from the first proposal to the final deliverable. The people who do the pitch to the client, do the work!

We aim to limit hierarchy. All our consultants are highly experienced and come from senior client roles, and even our most experienced Client Directors still ‘do the work’ for clients. However, over time, many of our team take on the challenges of running workstreams, projects and client relationships. People tend to stay with Oxford for many years, as it’s a unique business and they get the chance to develop and grow, whilst continuing to do the consulting work they love.

Most people make their own choice about that! Our Associates are happily independent freelancers who love to have that control. They also decide how much time they’re able to offer us, and can vary their availability as much as they need to. Our Staff tend to enjoy being part of a business, and working more regular and defined hours.

We run Status Determination Statements for all freelancers every year, and we are confident all our associate consultants work outside IR35.

The majority of the team are either in the UK or east-coast USA. But we are a fully remote-working team – we all work from home most or all of the time. We do have an office to the south of London in the UK, and some people like to work from there sometimes. And we encourage people to meet up in small groups whenever useful – either at someone’s house, or at a local shared workspace. But it’s completely flexible. As long as you can do your job well, you can work from pretty much anywhere.

We have a Wellbeing Policy and programme across all aspects of wellbeing, including mental and physical health, social engagement, and financial and career achievement. We take mental health seriously; many of our team are Mental Health First Aid trained, and we are committed to open conversations. We also have fun together, with regular F2F meetups with project colleagues, an active Stava group, online events such as wine tasting and Escape Rooms, and a big annual in-person ‘Gathering’ for the whole global community.

We are currently working towards formal accreditation as Menopause-Friendly. We are a female-majority community with a wide age range from 20s to 60s, so we have a lot of personal experiences to share!

We believe we pay in line with our industry, but our focus is on fairness and transparency. For Staff, there are published salary bands for every role, so everyone knows where they are and what they aspire to. Our annual Staff bonus is based on the whole organisation’s performance, so we are all in it together and motivated to help and support each other, not to compete. For Associates, we have a transparent policy on the rates we pay for specific types of work and deliverables, and we are committed to paying fairly (we pay for everything we ask Associates to do, even non-client work) and quickly (we pay within two weeks of the monthly invoice, we don’t wait till the client pays us). We’re delighted to say we have very low turnover.

We have a good paid leave allowance, that increases with years of service. In addition to paid leave, we are keen to enable our staff to manage their lives and families in a flexible way so unpaid leave is available to all. And on the other hand some unused paid leave can be carried over or taken as pay. We are as flexible and supportive as possible.

Consulting Careers

Why work with Oxford?

Our values aren't just words

Meaning

Stretch

Flexibility

Fairness

Happiness

We are fully committed to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

We recruit both Staff and Associates

Interested in joining our team?

FAQs

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