webdna is a Campaign Best Place to work in 2026

By Sophie Blaken

Four times a best place to work. The hardest one yet.

This year, webdna was named one of Campaign UK’s Best Places to Work for the fourth time.

We’ve entered every year since we became big enough to qualify, which means this award has followed us through our biggest growth as a business.

And honestly, this one means the most. Not because things are easy right now. Probably because they aren’t.

Objectively, webdna is the best place to work it has ever been. We have more benefits than we’ve ever had before. Better support. Better flexibility. Better tools. Better processes. More opportunities. We’ve introduced things designed to genuinely make people’s lives easier, both inside and outside work.

But at the same time, this has probably been one of the hardest periods we’ve been through as a company. We’re right on the edge of that 25-to-50-employee jump that so many agencies talk about. The phase where businesses either level up properly or lose themselves a bit along the way.

To grow, we’ve had to change. A lot.

New people. New processes. New structures. New ways of working. More accountability. More complexity. More moving parts.

We use DISC profiling across the business to help us work better together, and the majority of our team naturally prefers steadiness and consistency. So even positive change can feel unsettling. And when lots of things change at once, it can feel hard, even when the direction is right.

That tension is real.

You can be building something better while people still feel tired from the process of getting there.

I think that’s why this award matters so much this year. Because it would have been easy for the foundations to wobble during this stage of growth. But underneath all the change, the thing that actually makes webdna special is still there.

And I don’t think it’s the things most workplace awards tend to measure.

It’s not a drinks fridge. It’s not socials. It’s not flu jabs or perks platforms or free coffee.

Those things are nice, and they matter, but they are not what makes a company a genuinely good place to work.

For me, it comes down to something much simpler.

If I put a message into our Slack tomorrow saying I needed help, whether that was work-related or personal, I know people would step in.

Not because they have to. Because they want to.

I’ve watched people help each other with client work, deadlines and stressful days. But I’ve also watched people collect parcels for each other at lunch, check in on someone having a rough week, help somebody move house, and even offer somewhere to stay when a teammate had problems with their flat.

That stuff is harder to measure.

You can’t really put it into a benefits package or a recruitment ad. I’m not sure how it gets scored in an awards process.

But I think that’s the real culture of a business. What people do when they don’t have to.

As we grow, I do worry about how we protect that.

Growth changes companies. It has to.

But so far, the things that have got us here are still working, good people, solid foundations, trying to lead by example, and caring properly about each other.

I hope that’s enough to carry us through the next stage too.

Because if we can reach 50 people and still have a team that would drop what they’re doing to help each other, then I think we’ll have built something really special.