Minimizing social Distance between Colleagues with a big Smile
All of this has been achieved with almost no physical face-to-face meetings across our company offices – now counting 6 locations in Denmark, Germany, and Sweden.
The challenges we met in 2020 have forced us – as many other companies across the globe – to reinvent ourselves. How do we create a sense of community while growing fast and being apart at the same time? For us, some of the answers to this difficult question have been found in paying careful attention to and rethinking HR and people related processes: Onboarding, supporting social life and foster team cohesion, just to name a few. As a company, our ability to execute, be efficiently innovative and to deliver cutting edge financial results all depend on a high level of trust and cooperation between colleagues and teams.
To create an environment of trust and cooperation, especially when we are geographically isolated due to lock down, we need to invent new ways of socializing and working with colleagues. We all miss the “funny stories by the coffee machine” or when colleagues inform of new adventures to be achieved. But we also miss the magic and energy that happens when people are working physically together in the same room, sharing, and forming exiting new ideas in a ping pong of normal conversation without wearing headsets and looking into a camera.
The photo show a glimpse of our last companywide Friday Bar. Going forward we will arrange Virtual Saloons with smaller theme rooms multiple times each month.
Both employees and management are encouraged to bring topics to the table and to facilitate free and open conversations in the theme rooms, just as we did by the “coffee machine”.
This Fridays’ topics were: Culture, Sports, Dance, The Word is Free, and Carnival (which might explain the pink wig worn by one of our colleagues 😉 ).
Throughout February we all join a cross-countries-and-offices virtual health challenge, initiated, and led by our newest hired employee.
The common goal is to go as many kilometers of the circumference of Planet Earth as possible. The sense of team spirit will be fueled by funny competitions and by the possibility to gain extra kilometers for free if teams run or walk “virtually together at the same time”. We have created a common virtual health challenge platform in our cloud-based IT landscape and hope that everybody will share photos, stories, selfies etc. during February.
Even if the world will return to its own old self one day and we will be able to meet each other face-to-face, we are convinced that some of the virtual ways of working and socializing have come to stay. They have proofed their worth multiple times.
But until then, we will keep exploring new ways of creating team spirit in a time of being apart.