What has Covid taught us about employee culture? That face-to-face time is still critical.
Like many companies across the globe, Kensho has seen a huge shift since the pandemic with many of our employees now primarily working from their homes. And also like many companies, we recognize that maintaining our vibrant and innovation-centric company culture without seeing each other in person daily requires thought, effort and creativity. That sentiment is at the heart of our Kensho Collab Weeks, which bring employees from across Kensho together for several days of collaboration, brainstorming, workshops, 1:1s, coffee chats, social activities, volunteering and more. Kensho just wrapped our most recent Collab week in October 2022.
“There’s just no substitute for the energy, collaborative spirit and magic you feel when getting together face-to-face instead of screen-to-screen” said Kensho’s Chief of Staff, Meaghan Cassidy. “While our day-to-day team operations are a reflection of our hybrid Work from Anywhere policy, events like Collab Week that foster spontaneity and in-person connection are essential to building our culture.”
One important finding of Collab Week is that some types of meetings, including longer creative brainstorming or ideation sessions, just don’t work as well virtually as they do in a face-to-face session.
One of our product teams was working to refine their messaging to make their somewhat complex NLP product easier for business audiences to quickly understand. Our design team had a whiteboard session to map out the design process across multiple projects. Many teams were planning out their 2023 roadmaps. When sessions like these are conducted in person, participants ask more questions, jump into conversations more fluidly and stay focused on more complex topics better for longer without the distractions that come with dialing in from a computer.
Another important component that we discovered from these events is that spontaneous interactions are a source of real value to our business, and are hard to replicate in scheduled virtual meetings. During Collab Week, the halls are full of conversations that start like these:
- “You must be the new developer who just started — how’s it going so far?”
- “I’m so glad I ran into you, I had an idea I wanted to tell you about.”
- “Were you two just talking about [topic]? My team has been discussing that too.”
More than just small talk, these interactions often spark more meaningful conversations that aid in cross-department collaboration, knowledge sharing and more.
And last but certainly not least, we find that employees who know each other better on a personal level develop more trust and are able to better collaborate and resolve conflicts in their day-to-day work. Having fun with colleagues is great for employee engagement, and tight bonds are a motivator that help us through tough projects and daunting challenges. So there’s nothing better than seeing the team laughing, building relationships, volunteering for a good cause, hanging out and generally having a great time together!
And what do Kensho employees think of Collab Week? It was well summed up by this Slack post from our #misc-caffeine-addicts channel:
Collab weeks are just one of many ways that Kensho is working to ensure that our culture and employee engagement remain strong regardless of where our employees chose to work.
Learn more about our culture, benefits and available positions on our website at: https://kensho.com/careers
