Over the past two years, we’ve created new teams from scratch in countries including UAE, China, India, South Africa, Belgium and the Netherlands. It hasn't come without its challenges, as you can imagine, and the competition to recruit great talent is tough.

We've had to understand these markets from a recruitment perspective: The culture, ways of working, and style of communication. It all varies from country to country.

In some countries, the candidate market wasn't as competitive, but you know there are some markets where attracting high calibre talent was challenging because the competition was tough, so it was more about what we can offer as an employer and not so much the other way round.

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We leaned on support from local recruitment agencies as well as our UK-based recruitment team to support our growing teams across the globe. Our internal recruitment team knows our culture and values and what we look for when recruiting at Europa, and they support all hires where they can cross all Europa locations no matter where we open new offices. It’s vital to ensure we continue to recruit the right people into the business and embed our values and culture consistently across all locations.

Europa’s international growth has been an exciting journey as it offered the business significant opportunities, but it has required careful planning and execution to navigate some complexities successfully, as you would imagine.

Some of the challenges we had planned for. Others we had to tackle along the way. The biggest challenge is to ensure there's consistency across all locations in terms of our culture, our policies and processes, engagement, communication generally, and how we do things ‘The Europa Way.’

We've come across language and culture challenges in ensuring Europa is compliant with local employment laws and tax regulations. It’s not always been easy making sure we can successfully recruit and retain talent, and that our international colleagues feel very much part of the Europa family regardless of where they're based.

We're currently developing and upskilling our HR business partners so they can fully support international colleagues as an HR team. And we are continuously learning and building our knowledge of local employment laws for each international location.

To further support this, our HR team has monthly meetings with directors and the senior leadership team to share local knowledge about best practices. We have sourced international legal support and partnered with local employment solicitors to further train the HR team with the knowledge they require in those areas.

You can understand, given the different cultures, our HR department has also worked closely with our international legal partners to develop standard operating procedures and policies that reflect the company culture and values to further support our international colleagues.

And then we've implemented and standardised an HR system globally, and our payroll team continues to be trained so they can understand tax regulations, to ensure Europa remains compliant from a payroll perspective.