CultureFest — Learnings
In April, Michelle, our office manager, and I were lucky enough to attend CultureFest, organized by Gsoft. Since Espresso Jobs did such an amazing job recapping the event, I figured, why redo the same thing and recap the event? Let’s try and implement some of the things I learned, and then share my findings. So with PeopleLikeUs as my guinea pig, off I went.
Employee Recognition
At CultureFest, Gsoft CEO Simon de Baene, revealed the Gsoft cape, an superman cloak that gets passed on from employee to employee in recognition of team effort and general awesomeness. The person who currently possesses the cape is responsible for awarding it to another colleague by month or week’s end.
This idea was spinning around in my brain and Alex, one of our account managers, must have read my mind. He introduced almost the exact same concept during one of our weekly Town Hall meetings. We don’t have a cape yet, but we do have our first distinguished colleague. Charlotte was honoured for going above and beyond her duties as customer manager for our Nirvana app. She’s been managing several internal projects, managing our social accounts (including this awesome blog), plus she’s started coding and making a few gifs too. Who will she pass the honours along to? We’ll find out next month.
Healthy Competition
Healthy competition is another area that can bring colleagues closer. For example, one Christmas each Gsoft employee got a FitBit to promote general wellness. Soon a competition emerged where all were tasked with walking the distance between Montreal and the location of their next holiday party. Not only was participation high, but the team also built a tracking app to monitor progress.
And Alex strikes again! Under his leadership, we soon launched a rolling monthly competition called PLU Champions. It began with a contest to see who could gain the most Instagram followers, and the next month we all gathered for a Google Tilt Brush contest on our HTC Vive. Each month’s winner is awarded possession of Honeydew, our spectacular golden unicorn. You can read all about it in Alex’s post.
We’re all on the edge of our seats right now, waiting to hear what the next contest will be. Stay tuned and we’ll tell you all about it.
HR — What Does It Stand For
Human Resources: are people really just resources? Could we just change the title to Culture and Talents? Talent Acquisition? Human Relations? Talent Management? Or literally any other name that refers to humans as entities, and not objects.
I totally agree that humans are much more than just resources, so we’ve been brainstorming our own title. We have started with a simple switch, referring to HR as Human Relations in interviews, and it seems to be gaining some traction
The Importance of Culture
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that culture can’t be copied. You might try to imitate a company you look up to, but if it’s not you, it’s not going to work. Culture is also constantly evolving; just like a human being, it’s always growing, maturing, and changing, but hopefully it always holds on to its same core values. And that’s OKAY!
In the past, we’ve looked to PeopleLikeUs’ founders, Elbert and Romina, to put down on paper what our culture is. What I’ve come to realize is that it was actually with us the whole time in every individual that works here. It’s not the dominant personality of any one person, but instead the sum of us all, and whenever a new person joins us, it gets passed on.
This event has really helped us refocus our attention on our employees and clients. We hope to continue encouraging awesomeness in the office and always being our best selves. There are so many things we picked up from the conference that will help us bring positivity to our office. As Gsoft said “Be a part of the wind of change we’re bringing to the world of work. Join the movement.“
