My Passions
Culture
I’m an advocate for strong culture.
Good culture is what makes hard work feel easy. At Label Insight and at Felux, I was a culture team member. The goal of these teams shouldn’t be to plan monthly birthday cakes and pizza parties, but to encourage open conversations among all employees at every level. They should look for creative methods to unite people, ensure everyone has a voice, and create a welcoming and comfortable work environment. They’re a way a company can truly invest in everyone’s well being.
So then one day I wanted to plan a pizza party…
The problem with the office pizza party.
The typical office pizza party often consists of a few basic 1-topping styles ordered from the nearest place that happened to be open. Don’t get me wrong, I would never miss one—I adore pizza in all its forms. However, in an attempt to revitalize the pizza party experience, I decided to establish a secret society. The fundamental idea behind this was to create an intriguing invitation for newcomers to the company to join, offered by a fellow colleague, in order to speed up that sense of belonging and make people feel welcome. Additionally, I aimed to steer away from mandatory fun and activities separate from the HR onboarding process. Ultimately, my goal was to inspire others to form unconventional clubs or organize peculiar events.
How Circular Sector works.
The goal of each meeting was to find the hidden gems of pizzas around each of the Chicago and St Louis offices. There are A LOT of different pizzas in both places. The society works by having everyone nominate a specific style of pizza from a specific place. Everyone votes for the ones they want to try and the top 3-5 are ordered. At the meeting, everyone samples all the nominees, and then votes “Yea” if they would eat it again or “Nay” if not. The pizza with the most “Yeas” wins the nominator eternal glory.
Out of a desire to recreate a pizza fest, I created a secret society.
Why a secret society?
Because I’m weird and it’s really an open secret, however, I did want it to depend on word of mouth to facilitate those conversations. So there are never event announcements outside of the Slack channel. We would shush others if they spoke the name during regular work meetings. We “hid” our symbols around the office…
As seen in the #general slack channel:
As seen in the #circular_sector slack channel:
How’d it go?
- Pequod’s – Deep Dish Pepperoni – Mark Levy
- Boiler Room – Waltzing Matilda (Honey mustard, cheddar, sauteed mushrooms, grilled amish chicken, bacon and mixed herbs) – Sam Shipman
- Beggars Pizza– Beef Taco Pizza – Stephanie Casstevens
- Piece – Hot Doug’s Atomic Sausage (Red pizza with pepper jack cheese, caramelized onions and Hot Doug’s famous Atomic Sausage.) – Haley Elsome
