It’s a Chimed Life: Meet our Workplace Experience Team
Imagine a summer festival that’s kid-friendly and fun for adults. Where you get to make tacos with a couple hundred other people in a live cooking class, explore chocolates in a guided tasting, learn how to make kombucha, dance and meditate, and see live music.
This was our annual summer event, otherwise known as SummerChime, and it all took place online on Friday, July 24, 2020.
Over 350 Chime employees and their family members came together via Zoom to take part in our highly interactive, engaging, and fun day-long party.
Before the event, every Chimer received a kit for making Oaxacan-inspired tacos and two side dishes at home. We cooked together on Zoom while following a demonstration and enjoyed our meal together — but apart.
The day was inclusive of family members (because our summer event always is), so there were various tracks to cater to big and little Chimers. We talked about the business of baseball with members of the Giants organization, had a Lego Masters expert give a Lego lesson, welcomed a reptile expert and her scaly friends in a reptile session, and invited an acclaimed food writer and owner of San Francisco’s only Sudanese restaurant to discuss issues and trends in the food industry.
We ended the day with two live music performances, featuring a fellow Chimer and a local band, Azuah. To share all of this with Chimers, we built a website with all the necessary information, a Chimer-sourced SummerChime playlist full of Chimers’ ultimate summer songs, and tons of other ways to get engaged.
The team that made SummerChime and all its thoughtful little details and awesome grand gestures possible is our Workplace Experience Team. They’re the team that works tirelessly to create a rich and inspiring work environment for Chimers, and SummerChime is just one example of how they pull it off every day.
Meet the team
Cat manages the Workplace Experience team. She focuses on workplace and employee engagement by enhancing experiences for and inspiring Chimers to do their best work.
Brianna is our Workplace Experience Coordinator, and she focuses on bringing the team’s visions to life. Whether she’s helping plan supply stations across the office or coordinating new vendors to ship out awesome swag to Chimers, she always gets it done.
Moti is our Food and Beverage Program Specialist. She’s always trying to find ways to connect people with food while participating in our local food systems and economies.
The importance of workplace experience
The Workplace Experience team’s mission is to create an environment that inspires Chimers to do the best work of their careers. In order to build community and strengthen Chimers’ shared sense of purpose, they create events and activities that offer Chimers the chance to make connections and get to know each other as humans, not just as coworkers, and craft spaces that keep our Chime Members and their stories front and center. And they have fun while they’re doing it!
The team hosts events — now all virtual, of course — which provide ways for Chimers to connect with one another over things that aren’t work-related. Many of these events involve food, too: “A lot of what we do revolves around sharing meals because doing so naturally creates a sense of community, which makes it an important part of our approach to events,” Moti says.
When it comes to measuring their program’s success, Cat, Brianna, and Moti look at the impact their work has on Chimers. By gathering and measuring feedback, attendance, and how well things catch on with Chimers, they can tell if their work is a success.
“We evaluate whether we’re providing content and experiences that Chimers are interested in,” Moti explains. For example, following our SummerChime kombucha session, a Slack channel was created where folks from the class continue to make kombucha and discuss it. “That, for us, is a success,” she says.
When the Workplace Experience becomes Shelter In Place Experience
When Shelter In Place happened for our SF, Chicago, and Vancouver Chimers, the Workplace Experience Team had to take a different approach — now instead of creating in-office events to build community, they had to find ways to create that sense of connection virtually.
“When we first went into shelter-in-place, our work became about getting people to connect and interact with each other — at home, you lose the ability to have those informal social interactions that are so important to building relationships,” Cat explains. So they started to think about how to foster connections among Chimers from home.
The first way the team created that sense of shared community was by mailing a ‘QuaranChime’ puzzle to all Chimers. The puzzle featured fun graphics and aimed to help Chimers stay entertained. “People weren’t expecting to get any sort of swag because we were all hunkered down, but we wanted to give them something that would keep them entertained whether they live alone, with roommates, or their families,” Cat says. The puzzle taught the team a valuable lesson early on in shelter-in-place: when everyone receives the same item or experience, they feel connected to each other and the company.
After the puzzle, the team continued to innovate: the next step was finding a way to launch swag from shelter-in-place. “At first, we were convinced we wouldn’t be able to produce any swag during shelter-in-place, but we found a new vendor to help us continue production of our anniversary sweaters and other swag items to delight Chimers,” Brianna explains. With a new vendor, the team could start new projects like SummerChime swag and continue old traditions like new hire swag boxes and anniversary gifts.
The team has also launched weekly Life Hack Lunch and Learns, which have been a huge success. “Our Lunch and Learns are a moment of respite for Chimers to be human, one of our values, in the midst of everyone’s day,” Cat explains. Topics covered have included cooking classes, tarot readings, and how to care for your indoor house plants.
Since food is such an important factor when it comes to connecting, Moti and the team wanted to find a way to build connection over food during shelter-in-place. So they launched Chime’s snackbox program, which sends a beautiful, custom-made box full of snacks to Chimers on a monthly basis. They’ve used this opportunity to support local businesses, and for the August snackbox, they featured snacks from BIPOC food makers Pipcorn, Partake, and Oh-Mazing Granola. “When you can get people, no matter where they are, to eat the same food at the same time, it’s a huge undertaking that has proven crucial to helping people feel connected,” Moti says.
Always more to be done
The biggest win of the shelter-in-place experience was by far SummerChime, but the team knows that it’s the everyday details that truly make being a Chimer — wherever we may be — special.
And in the spirit of constant improvement, Cat, Brianna, and Moti know there’s always more to do, so they keep innovating.
“We learned from SummerChime that our teams enjoy cooking together, they love to get activity kits at home, and they are eager to get to know other Chimers in smaller groups,” Cat explains. “We’ve also added 200 new people since we started working from home who have not had the chance to meet new Chimers outside of their teams. So we created a new program this fall — Chime Connections — which builds on what we learned from SummerChime and creates opportunities for Chimers to socialize in smaller breakout groups over shared activities.”
“Constantly innovating and thinking of creative ways to connect is our challenge for now — luckily, we’re a hugely inspired team and so excited about making the best of the circumstances our team is currently facing,” Cat explains. That also means finding ways to be inclusive of other Chime offices, like Chicago and the newly launched Vancouver team.
The team is already thinking forward to the holidays and will undoubtedly pull off a memorable event for all. In the meantime, we can’t wait to see the many ways they continue to keep Chimers connected.
Interested in joining our growing team and enjoying all the wonderful work our Workplace Experience does? Check out our open positions.
