Faith's Collective Culture
While getting ready to graduate college back in 2019, I always heard this term: ‘company culture.’ I was almost done with my marketing degree, and I imagined my future job to have a very professional company culture. To me this meant a competitive work environment, where work was strictly for work and I might never meet and would never really talk to the CEO. After all, this is what countless professors and industry connections told me to expect from a workplace.
Fast forward to my first day at HUB, which just happened to land on the six-year workiversary of Colleen, one of our insanely talented designers. I walked into the office and was promptly told that we were celebrating with a karaoke lunch. Here I was, fresh out of college, on the first day of my ‘adult career,’ and we were all going out together to do something fun. To say I was a bit confused was an understatement. I expected this lunch to be brief and somewhat awkward. We had to get back to work, and there’s no way people could have fun and relax at a ‘work lunch.’ Wow, I was so wrong! That day we had a three-hour karaoke lunch, filled with an insane amount of laughter and very committed performances by my coworkers (dance moves included). And I walked away from that lunch having my previous vision of what my workplace would look like completely shattered.
Walking into a three-hour karaoke lunch with people you have just met a couple hours prior can be daunting to say the least. I expected people to sit and maybe give 50% effort to just get it all over with. Instead I was absolutely blown away by full performances from my new coworkers. From full dance routines to perfectly practiced duets, there was no fear of judgment, it was all accepted and celebrated. And there were even some HUB employees who did not perform at all and were not pressured to perform. This blend of people who all trusted and respected each other to that level absolutely blew my mind, and on that first day I was shown how HUB can be both fun and real.
Don’t be fooled by the story of my first day; the takeaway isn’t that HUB does fun stuff together, even if that is true. The takeaway is that I don’t come to work every day, put on my ‘HUB employee’ mask, and pretend that all I do is live and breathe our work. We all come to work every day as real people. We come to work as people with emotions, ambition, creativity, quirks, and most importantly, empathy for others. And I think the ability to come to work with this level of vulnerability is what allows us to not only push each other to produce great work but has also allowed HUB to thrive even after going completely remote in March 2020.
I only worked in the HUB office for nine months before packing my laptop and working from home. And to be honest, I was absolutely terrified of this change, and I thought it would flip the company culture that I grew to love upside-down. But it didn’t. We have supported each other through this rollercoaster of the past two years, even on the many days when there’s no good news to report. We have found ways to have fun with each other. The culture here at HUB has allowed us not only to enjoy the work that we do, but to enjoy who we do it with.
