Year in Review: Chime Chicago
“Jason Howard was our first Chicago hire,” says Amy Silverman, our Head of Recruiting in the midwestern office. Now the team is almost 100 employees, just over a year later. “We used to eat lunch around one small table, and now we’d need a small banquet hall — and for many, meeting for lunch would be the first time they met in person since so much of our growth happened during 2020,” she adds.
Our Chicago office opened in late 2019, just a few months before all employees were forced to work from home. But that didn’t stop our team from growing — and thriving. “It’s been a great exercise in taking a mindful approach to growth because of all the curveballs we’ve been thrown,” explains Jason, our Senior Director of Risk.
For Emily Anderson, the office’s Director of Engineering, Chime’s faith in the Chicago Leadership made all the difference in how the team grew last year. “The special thing about Chime is that there’s an incredible amount of trust across leaders and colleagues — we’re counted on to know our team and people and decide when to grow faster or pull back the reins so the team can gel and become one unit,” she says. “We’ve been able to ebb and flow in a way that’s best for our people because, after all, without a solid team, you don’t have much of a company.”
Growth, distributed work, and evolving processes
When Chime first decided to open our Chicago office, it represented our first opportunity to think about a distributed workforce: Which roles need to be centralized, which can be done anywhere? The pandemic was added to that discussion, and soon, all of our offices had to learn how to work in the new normal. “2020 was a forcing function to help us decide what needs to be located in one place versus what can be distributed and how we’d plan the growth of our teams across offices — all while working from home,” says Jason. “It was a way for us to practice distributed work and dial it in on the teams we wanted to have spread out.”
While Chime grew into new area codes and distributed work across our teams, we also had to think about changing processes across the company, including piloting several programs in different offices to see whether we wanted to roll them out Chime-wide.
Emily mentions, “In Chicago, for example, we piloted our continuous feedback process and career planning sessions, which we are now rolling out across different parts of Chime.”
With Chicago’s growth, our entire company has become more empathetic — and not just to the harsher winter weather the team faces several months of the year. “When Chime Chicago opened, the company was used to being in San Francisco only,” Amy explains. “That meant that the default for meetings was Pacific time and Zoom links were often amiss from calendar invites.” With a growing presence in Chicago and the pandemic’s onset — not to mention a new office in Vancouver — the entire Chime team has thought about working collaboratively in different places. “Now, there’s always a Zoom link in every invite, and we work better together,” says Amy.
Crafting a Chime Chicago Culture
Chime has a unique philosophy on opening new offices — that’s to say, we treat every office as a main office, not a satellite, and want each team to develop its version of Chime culture. “How we scale our culture across Chime as a whole inevitably shifted with our two additional offices in Chicago and Vancouver,” says Emily. “Each office has had the unique opportunity to decide which processes to share and which ones we want to tweak to personalize for Chicago. Chicago isn’t San Francisco — so the team and culture reflect that,” she adds.
Chime Chicago started in an office in Fulton Market as a team of 3, then moving inside the loop and growing to a team of 8. Though their stay in the new office was cut short by the pandemic, they didn’t stop growing — they figured out how to grow and make the new normal work for them.
A large part of continuing on their growth trajectory has been culture; the culture that has emerged at Chime in Chicago is a deliberate one. The leadership team has intentionally created Chicago-specific events and employee experiences to keep the team connected to their Chicago counterparts and other Chimers. For example, they host a Chicago all-hands quarterly, where they cover everything that’s going on with the group in Chicago and include a fun, Chicago touch: A Cameo video of a star saying hi to the team (Cameo is a local Chicago company).
The team also hosts Chicago-specific lunches, offering various sessions to be respectful of people who eat at different times.
When it comes to Chicago swag, the team is also very deliberate. “Our Chime Chicago culture reflects our core view that every Chime office is a main office — to that end, swag is about more than just sending stuff; it’s about creating artifacts that will help us connect and show off our style,” says Amy. So when it came time to create summer swag for Chimers, our Chicago office wanted something to help them seize the season. “Summers in Chicago are a precious time when we maximize the minutes spent outdoors near a body of water,” explains Amy. “So we proposed making a Chime beach towel for Chicago Chimers. Swag has allowed us to create our own identity and infuse our own Chicago culture into Chime practices.”
Perhaps most important to Chime culture in Chicago is the midwestern kindness the team embodies. “We’ve started several practices that help us take care of each other,” says Emily. They had a Slack channel to connect and make sure people weren’t alone over the holidays and put time on each others’ calendars to take walks when the weather is warm enough. “Everyone knows that the weather in Chicago can get folks down and gloomy — we’re all here to make sure that people are taking care of themselves,” she adds. “We also know that we don’t have to plan everything, so we will throw impromptu team lunches on the calendar. It’s nice to have the flexibility and financial ability to look out for your team with simple things like last-minute meals for everyone to connect over.”
Looking back at 2020 — and forward to 2021
There’s no denying that 2020 was a tumultuous year for everyone. Between the global pandemic, events in Chicago like peaceful protests and looting, and an eventful election season, everyone at Chime and in communities across the world felt the weight of the year. “In particular, the unrest in Chicago shook the team and caused a lot of people to feel both anxious and, in some cases, unsafe,” Jason explains. “The leadership team in Chicago rallied to support employees, providing them with resources and safe spaces to lean on each other,” he adds. While some were unfortunate, the events of 2020 provided a unique way for leadership to engage with the team at a Chicago level and brought the team closer through shared experiences.
When the team reflects on the past year, they’re proud of their resilience and strength. “The team not only made it through 2020 but is as, if not more, effective than pre-pandemic,” says Jason. “At a time when many companies were slowing growth, we powered through, successfully growing our team and brand in a new city — and that’s something to be proud of,” says Amy.
The way Emily sees it, “What it comes down to is the group of humans we’ve hired — they are what makes Chime Chicago what it is. As a team, we’re united and ready to get through whatever comes our way — together.”
The team will continue to grow in the year ahead while focusing on staying connected and infusing the Chicago Chime culture with its own touch of midwest culture. We’re excited to see what they do.
Are you interested in joining our Chicago crew? Check out our open positions here.
