rewrite this title What Does It Take to Earn Most Loved Workplace Status? Plume Figured It Out in 12 Months – UC Today

There are companies that talk about culture. Then there are companies that actually build it. Plume just joined the second group – and in rather spectacular fashion. The global connectivity platform, trusted by more than 450 Internet Service Providers across 58 countries, has earned Most Loved Workplace Certification from the Best Practice Institute less than twelve months after launching a full-scale culture overhaul.

In an industry where employee experience is increasingly the difference between a company that ships great tech and one that just ships promises, Plume’s achievement is worth paying attention to.

The Talent War Has a New Front Line

Employee experience has become one of the most contested battlegrounds in enterprise technology. In an era where “quiet quitting” gave way to a talent market that demands far more than a vague mission statement and subsidised oat milk, organisations are waking up to a hard truth: culture is a competitive moat, not an HR checkbox.

For global tech companies specifically – where distributed teams, high-pressure roadmaps, and burnout are practically baked into the job description – the gap between businesses that treat people strategy as a boardroom priority and those that treat it as a nice-to-have is widening fast.

The data backs this up. Most Loved Workplaces, assessed via the rigorous Love of Workplace Index (LOWI) framework, consistently outperform peers on retention, productivity, and, crucially, the quality of what they deliver to customers. Plume just planted its flag firmly in the winner’s column.

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The Transformation That Moved at Startup Speed

When Dan Herscovici stepped into the President and CEO seat at Plume in April 2025, he led with people. Culture became one of the company’s first declared strategic priorities = and Chief People Officer Lorie Boyd was handed a mandate well beyond the usual HR playbook.

The initiative targeted trust, accountability, and belonging across a global workforce. Assessed across the five SPARK dimensions: Systemic Collaboration, Positive Future, Alignment of Values, Respect, and Killer Outcomes – the certification isn’t awarded for good intentions; but through measurable emotional connection reflected in employees’ own language.

The company will be featured among certified Most Loved Workplaces in The Economist in May 2026 and The Wall Street Journal in October 2026. Not a bad double billing.

What This Means for Employee Experience

For HR and people leaders watching from the sidelines, the clock is ticking. Plume’s certification puts a spotlight on something the industry has been quietly circling: the most effective culture transformations happen when they are owned at the top and measured like any other business KPI – not delegated to a committee and celebrated with a town hall.

For enterprise buyers, vendor culture is increasingly on the radar too. A disengaged workforce builds disengaged products. Plume’s twelve-month sprint to certification is, frankly, the professional equivalent of showing up to the class reunion looking inexplicably better than everyone else.

In Their Own Words

Herscovici made the business case directly:

“You cannot deliver world-class experiences for 450 ISP customers if the people building the products and solutions don’t feel respected and heard. Building better connections is not just a tagline – it is a commitment that we strive for every day, not only with our customers, but equally with our team members.”

Boyd was equally direct on how transformation actually works in practice:

“Culture transformation at a company with offices around the world doesn’t happen by sending an email. What made this real was that we didn’t treat it as an HR initiative. It was a complete commitment from the CEO down through the entire organisation.”

Louis Carter, CEO and Founder of Best Practice Institute and Most Loved Workplace, framed the broader signal:

“What sets Most Loved Workplaces apart is not a score on a survey — it is the depth of emotional connection employees feel to their work, their colleagues and the future they are building together. That is not soft. That is a competitive advantage.”

What the Industry Should Be Reading Between the Lines

Plume’s cultural reset hasn’t happened in a vacuum. The same twelve-month window has seen the company acquire AI care orchestration platform Sweepr, launch the industry’s first open Agentic AI platform for ISPs – built on telemetry from 500 million connected devices – and deploy advanced WiFi 7 technology with partners including J:COM in Japan and FPT Telecom in Vietnam.

That level of execution doesn’t emerge from a disengaged team. As someone once wisely observed:

“Great things in business are never done by one person — they’re done by a team of people.”

(That was Steve Jobs, not a LinkedIn influencer, for what it’s worth.)

For the industry, Plume’s certification is a preview of where the talent war is heading – past salary benchmarks and hybrid policies, into the territory of culture infrastructure that employees can actually feel. The companies building that infrastructure now are the ones who will be impossible to compete with in three years. The ones that aren’t? Well, they’ll have a very nice ping-pong table to console themselves with.

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