Inside Bright Plus: The Team Culture Behind an Award-Winning Staffing Business

When Bright Plus won the Talent Business Award for Best Talent Business to Work For in 2025, the company was proud and excited to receive such significant external recognition for their hard work. The victory was a powerful confirmation that they are doing the right things.

"It was a shared feeling across our entire organisation," says Linda Cappelle, Managing Director. "The Great Place to Work recognition comes from your own employees. But this award was recognition from the outside, from the industry and peers. And it felt wonderful that the efforts we made together as a team, that those were seen and valued."

That word, together, is not incidental. It is, in many ways, the entire story of Bright Plus

From Secretary Plus to Bright Plus

Bright Plus is a specialist staffing company founded in Belgium in 1993, today part of RGF Staffing Belgium. The company operates from 17 branches across Flanders and Wallonia, with around 100 employees in its office network and approximately 500 project consultants working on assignment at client sites. Its focus is tightly defined: multilingual professionals across five domains — sales and customer service, HR, marketing, logistics and procurement, and administration.

The company was known for decades as Secretary Plus. The rebranding, completed in October 2019, was a deliberate act. The multilingual office professional had evolved far beyond the old "secretary" label: from executing and supporting to facilitating, managing projects independently, and specialising across domains. The name no longer matched their responsibilities.

"We absolutely wanted to keep the Plus," says Cappelle. "Because after all, the Plus, that’s our people. They were the Plus at Secretary Plus, and they are the Plus at Bright Plus." Bright was chosen for its double meaning: bright solutions for clients and candidates, and a bright future, the open, enthusiastic spirit the company had always carried.

A Niche Under Pressure

Bright Plus operates in a Belgian labour market that Cappelle describes plainly as economically tough. Clients are restructuring, labour costs are rising, and the talent challenge has shifted from both a quantitative problem to a qualitative one.

For a company built around multilingual professionals, that qualitative pressure is acutely felt. Bright Plus tests every candidate — young graduates included — on oral and written language skills in French, English, and Dutch. The trend in those results is consistently downward.

"Language skills are declining rapidly," Cappelle says. "Not just in French or Dutch — also in English. Universities and colleges tell us the same: students arrive with knowledge already below what they used to see, and there isn't enough time to close that gap."

Translation technology helps, she believes in AI as an amplifier, but it does not replace the added value of actual language proficiency. " You still need to feel the culture when working with someone in another language. You can be supported, but it can never be a replacement."

In response, Bright Plus has leaned further into its advisory role. The company runs its own market research, shares insights with clients, coaches candidates through language development, and operates primarily with SMEs — where it can function as an extension of the HR function rather than a transactional supplier.

In the context of a challenging labor market, where talent scarcity and rising demands place immense pressure on organizations, the mission of Bright Plus is fundamentally linked to internal wellbeing. Success is no longer purely a matter of transactional placement or technical expertise; it is dependent on the people who deliver the solutions. An organization can only thrive if its employees are supported, engaged, and feel good. Consequently, in the modern employment landscape, prioritizing employee wellbeing has transitioned from a beneficial "nice-to-have" to a non-negotiable strategic imperative.

The High Five: A Wellbeing Framework Built to Last

The culture inside Bright Plus did not appear by accident. It was built, deliberately, structurally, and over many years, in response to a moment Cappelle has never forgotten.

It was 2016, the year she became Managing Director. A colleague she deeply admired, someone she describes as a "real power woman," was out for a longer period of time due to health reasons.

"I thought: if it can happen to her, it can happen to me. It can happen to anyone in this organisation." The conclusion was immediate: Bright Plus needed a structural approach to wellbeing, not a reactive one.

What emerged was not a forty-page policy document. Cappelle wanted something simple enough to put on a wall, something the team could actually own. She looked at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, found it too theoretical, and translated it into five organisational goals that any employee could understand: happy, healthy, talented, informed, and motivated.

Five goals. Five pillars. One for each finger the team celebrates with a collective high five whenever a new wellbeing initiative is introduced or when we support each other.

The framework became known as the High Five wellbeing policy. Initially, Cappelle admits, it fell into a familiar trap. "We thought wellbeing meant being healthy. Consequently, we immediately launched initiatives focused on physical wellbeing, such as distributing health trackers, providing fresh fruit in the office, and participating in running races." But the framework pushed the team to invest across all five dimensions: physical and mental health, psychological safety, mutual trust, an open feedback culture, and personal development.

"The basis of a healthy team is mutual respect and trust," she says. "We build teams where conflicts can be discussed, where smart agreements are made, where people hold each other accountable, and where successes are celebrated."

In 2023, a sixth pillar was added: sharing is caring. The idea that happiness is worth sharing beyond the organisation's walls. "I don't like big buzz words," Cappelle says. "I like small, tangible initiatives, especially the ones that come from the people themselves. If I arrive with all the ideas, I've already lost. But if it comes from them, the chances of success are so much greater."

That bottom-up philosophy shaped High Five for Work-Life, Cappelle's book on workplace wellbeing. First published in 2020, finished in March of that year, just as the pandemic hit, it was substantially revised and relaunched in 2025. "On the inside it felt like light renovations. But it turned out to be major construction work." The revised edition zooms in on what changed over those five years: hybrid work, individualisation, AI, and how Bright Plus navigated each of them as a team.

One Bright Team

"The success of our wellbeing policy lies in the fact that it is shaped by and for our people. We actively involve them throughout the process, ensuring it truly reflects their needs. Not just our office employees. Also project consultants: the roughly 500 professionals working on assignments with our clients at sites across Belgium. I find it extremely important that they carry the Bright Plus feeling with them in the field," Cappelle says. "They are absolutely part of One Bright Team."

The High Five Board is made up of two rotating groups of eight employees (drawn from both office staff and project consultants) who volunteer to participate. They collect pulse surveys, brainstorm responses, and pitch proposals directly to the management team. Their voices shape real decisions.

Beyond the board, project consultants are included in national meetings and conference calls, kept up to date on strategy, marketing, and internal developments, and each given a single dedicated point of contact. The same model applies to clients: one person, consistently, who knows the relationship and does not need the story retold.

"That's how you build a relationship where, eventually, one word is enough," Cappelle says. "You don't have to explain your situation every time. That's a real long-term partnership: with clients and with the people in the field."

Leadership by Proximity

Cappelle has led Bright Plus for almost a decade. She has no fixed office. No reserved desk. Neither does anyone on her management team.

Every day, she works from a different branch. She joins the lunch table. She takes coffee with whoever is there, and she asks, genuinely, how people are doing.

"Our people are our ambassadors," Cappelle says. "I truly want to understand how everyone is doing: the wellbeing of our team, the status of our candidates, and the latest developments with our clients. If I listen carefully, I make much better decisions. And it keeps everything accessible.

On hybrid work (a theme she explores at length in High Five for Work-Life) she is measured but firm. The benefits are real. But so are the risks, particularly for managers leading asynchronous teams.

"I always think of summer festivals. While the sound quality might be objectively better through headphones at home, we still attend because the core experience is about human connection, community, speaking to others, being part of something, and feeling connected. That communal experience is human nature, and as an employer, you cannot underestimate it."

On AI, she first measured how her team felt about it. The results showed genuine anxiety: What does this mean for my job? Will I keep up? Her response was not to push adoption, but to create clarity, then confidence.

"If you're already good at your job and you embrace AI, automation, and digitisation, you can only get better. But you have to decide where in your process you apply it. Use it to create more room for human contact, not less. And always keep a human in the loop."

On the tension between individual needs and team cohesion, a growing challenge as employees expect personalised careers, schedules, and development paths, Bright Plus uses a simple but consistent framework. When someone asks for a change, Cappelle asks them to think through four perspectives: what does it mean for you? For your team? For your manager? And for the organisation as a whole?

"We pull people upward from their individual need toward understanding what it means for the others. That's how you make choices that last."

What the Award Really Means

Bright Plus won the Talent Business Award for Best Talent Business to Work For in 2025. It was the latest in a long line of external recognitions, including twelve years of Great Place to Work certification. But Cappelle is careful about how that history is framed.

"Wellbeing is never finished. You can't tick it off a list. It lives. You have to keep investing in it, together with your people, and through your people."

Wellbeing at Bright Plus is not just an HR initiative. It is a strategic choice, with HR at the decision table but responsibility shared across the entire organisation. "One of the things I say internally: every single one of us is responsible for the happiness and success of the colleague sitting to our left or right. If you take good care of the other, the other will take care of you. That is the foundation of everything we do."

Her closing message to other staffing leaders is simple, and consistent with everything that came before it: invest in your people, even when, especially when, times are difficult.

"Make sure people feel safe and secure. Keep investing in their growth and development. Maintain an open feedback culture, even when you don't have all the answers yourself. There is enormous strength in being honest and transparent in difficult times. Because if people don't know what's happening, they fill in the blanks themselves. And human nature being what it is, they never fill them in positively."

It is not a complicated philosophy. But at Bright Plus, it has been applied consistently, structurally, and collectively for almost a decade. Across 17 branches. Across 100 office employees and 500 project consultants. Across a rebranding, a pandemic, and a shifting market.

That, more than anything, is why the award sits where it does.

Bright Plus is a specialist staffing company based in Belgium, part of RGF Staffing Belgium. The company focuses on multilingual professionals across five professional domains, operating from 17 branches across Flanders and Wallonia. Bright Plus won the Talent Business Award 2025 for Best Talent Business to Work For. Linda Cappelle has served as Managing Director since 2016 and is the author of High Five for Work-Life (2025).

This article is part of the Talent Business Insights portrait series, highlighting best practices and leadership stories from the Belgian staffing and recruitment industry.