Breaking the Ice

We’ve introduced a concept that our CPO and our head of workplace experience have come up with, which is called Posh Connect, and Posh Connect is sort of a gathering for a day or for like an afternoon, almost like our live Posh Parties where people come together, employees come together, and they engage with each other. So, it’s not just coming together and everyone is on Zoom, they’re actually coming together and engaging with each other and talking to each other. And those have been extremely successful. We’ve done several of them in our headquarters here in Redwood City, we’ve done them in Chennai. Our chief data officer was in New York and she put a small Posh Connect together with 10 to 20 people. So, I feel like that program has a lot of promise in bringing people together.

And so when you have these smaller groups, is there a moderator? How does that work? Because sometimes people are kind of shy and not everybody is an extrovert.

There are formats and techniques that we do. And yes, there’s definitely a, I wouldn’t call them a moderator, but a leader to sort of, you know, working through it. So, when we do them in the office, we’ll have sort of different desks and different sort of gathering stations. And the goal will be to really invite different people to speak. We try to do that even in the Zoom call, right? They’ll just, you know, hey, Darlene, what are you thinking? Or John, what are you thinking?” So just kind of try to pick that out.
And then the second thing is having different formats, because even for many of the folks there, first of all, they may not have seen anybody physical in the company ever, because they joined in Covid times. Second, I think we’ve all become a little more introverted, a little shy, or a little sort of less social in a way. Some may become more social, but a lot of us have become a little, you know?
And so just getting people slowly easing back and letting people be is important. And then just respecting boundaries. I think there’s a lot of people who don’t want to come in. And I think we’re okay with hybrid sort of approach as well. It’s a lot of change. I mean, we’ve had people who’ve been super social and traveling and everything. And then we have an executive who hasn’t stepped out of his home in two years, still hasn’t done it, because his kid is below five, and there’s some immunity issues, you know, so he’s waiting for them to turn five to get vaccinated and then move on. So, it’s really a very, very wide range of reactions and things, and it’s just good to ask these days.