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?

I only had meetings if people asked, and enough meetings were requested over the years that we even held championship editions with 3 or 4 previous winning pizzas. At any time, membership was between 1/2 and 2/3 of the company. And now the world has better pizza data that I can share! If you’re ever in Chicago (or some of these ship!), here are 4 unique, crowd-pleasing grand champion pizzas and their nominators: