I was still a manager at UPMC Enterprises when COVID-19 hit. At first, it was super-exciting since none of us had ever worked from home and getting to “work” in our pajamas was awesome. But after a couple months, we felt the anxiety of not knowing how long we’d be apart from each other. As a manager, I was on a lot of calls trying to figure out how we would get people back in the office.
I worried about my team and how they were holding up. I bought each of them a different Oprah Chopra meditation series, and each morning we connected on Teams to chat about that morning’s meditation. Something for us to still feel like a team because what we felt was our aloneness.
Eventually, I left UPMC (still during the pandemic) but kept thinking about how we work and how that was going to be totally different now. During my final year at Tepper (Carnegie Mellon’s business school), I took a bunch of entrepreneurship classes, and as part of the work, you had to pick an idea and put it through the entrepreneurship ringer to evaluate, vet and formulate a clear market problem and propose a solution.
I picked the original “back to office” issue, but after talking to tons of HR people, managers, and employees, realized pretty quickly that the real concern was employees getting isolated and disengaged; losing ties to their company and to each other. The bonds that historically created a team that created a community at work were gone.
This is why I’m excited about Culturora. We are 100% focused on helping employees regain their sense of belonging to each other and to their company culture. And we’re working hard to make it happen.
Thanks for reading!
Jody
