Here to stay

Fatima Girach
Monster Culture
Published in
4 min readFeb 23, 2018

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With the moto ‘Make Diabetes Suck Less’ and a job interview that left me feeling like I don’t want to work anywhere else, there was only one option for me — being part of the monster tamers at mySugr. I joked to my friends that if I wasn’t offered the job, I would keep turning up anyway until someone accepted that I work there…..I really wasn’t joking. So why the strong connection? Well, not only is diabetes a topic close to my heart but the culture at mySugr stands for a lot.

Seconds after walking into the mySugr office, you can see that it is an active and fun place made up of active and fun people who are actually happy to be there. Not all work places can say that. People are welcoming, respectful, funny and anything but serious.

This shouldn’t be mistaken for them not being serious about what they do — believe me, they are!

They also do a wonderful job in welcoming new employees. This is the fourth place that I have worked at and I’ve never experienced such an onboarding. Where else does a task on your checklist for the first week include ‘Write to Oliver and get a monster’? I most definitely wrote to Oliver and told him about my background as a scientist and my love of elephants and and my oh my, did I get the most perfect monster.

As much as personalized monsters play a vital part in integration to the company, the culture is more than that. When hiring new employees, cultural fit sits high in the ranks at mySugr and I quickly realized why — things are done in a very special way here. For example, on my first day I was handed ‘The Little Green Book — A Handbook for New Monsters’.

A beautiful hardbound book with a monster theme (what else?) filled with information on life at mySugr, the company’s history and a pretty cool who’s who. Most highlighted was the company’s culture and a guide on how to fit in. I remember taking my book home and reading it like an excited child. It genuinely made me smile from ear to ear and it will forever hold a proud place on my bookshelf.

‘Have you got your Little Green Book?’ also became a great conversation starter, not that conversation starters are really needed here. I found myself being invited to lunch by different people each day, being asked if I needed any help getting started and talking to people who genuinely wanted to get to know me. A month in and I felt like I had always belonged here, a feeling that some people never achieve in a lifetime.

Being happy in the workplace is incredibly important for the psyche. After all, it is the place that we spend most of our waking days. mySugr emphasizes the importance of this and appreciation of its employees may it be providing us with the best quality office chairs and sofas or organizing spectacular social activities.

I keep asking myself what is it that makes mySugr so special. Is it that they genuinely care about making both their users and employees lives better? Is it that the company is made up of such a wide variety of people and skills? Is it that it is an honest bottom-up company? Or is it that everyone is on the same page? I would like to think that it is all of the above and plenty more that makes mySugr such a wonderful place to be. I write ‘be’ instead of ‘work’ because it feels like more than just a place to work. It feels like a home with one big family. I’m confident that these reasons will keep piling up and I stand by my original attitude — I refuse to leave.

mySugr Co-founders, Gerald Stangl, Fredrik Debong, Michael Forisch and Frank Westermann

To see more of what our mySugr monster tamers have to say about our culture have a look here. If you love technical topics, our engineers also share cool stuff from time to time.

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