When you’re young and you start your first job, you might know that you’ll be facing some challenges at the office: criticism, some office politics here and there, or that moment when you first asked for a raise. Remember it? Not the best time of your month.
We do believe that challenges build strong characters, but since we’re not your average Joes, we sought to create challenges in our team that exclude conflicts, frustration or bad moods of any kind. Thus, as we sat long hours in the office, we first came up with the idea to tidy it up a little, just like a team.
We actually believe that keeping your space clean helps you clear up your thoughts too, so we started with the kitchen. The challenge that everybody received via email: “let’s keep our kitchen as clean as possible for one week!”
Challenge accepted.
Bogdan, our Operations Manager, was evaluating the situation each evening, after most of the people left the office and he kept us posted with photographic evidence of our evolution. It was quite amazing to see how motivated everybody was to keep things in order. We washed the dishes religiously, took out the garbage and leave the window open to let some fresh air in every single day.
At the end of week, there comes the prize we won: a selfie stick for the team! It’s a 100% shareable item, perfect for our holidays this summer.
The next week came with a new challenge: raising awareness on our Facebook page. Basically, everybody was asked to invite a few people from their list of friends to “like” our page and help us reach 1000 likes. The challenge started on Monday, but by Wednesday we had already reached somewhere around 1040 likes. Once again, challenged accepted and aced!
The second prize: taxi vouchers for everyone in the team to help us get home safe after long hours at the office or LogOuts (our monthly fun night in the city).
However, in the end, this is not a story about how we won one selfie stick (a pretty fancy one though) and taxi vouchers. It is about how asking the right things create enthusiasm and can engage a team of friendly geeks. It’s a story about initiative, teamwork and rewards, as our challenges included no punishments or direct competition.
The creation of a great work environment takes time, a lot of patience and never-ending enthusiastic thoughts. But we are ready to keep challenging ourselves and fulfil all our #teamgoals.
