While I was in the US I spent a lot of time thinking about our company culture. Sure Nuffnang’s culture is something to be proud of. The Nuffies as we know it are a really fun bunch and it’s really fun to work at Nuffnang. Or so I hear.
But as in all things we do, there’s always the possibility of doing better. So I spent a lot of time in the US thinking, reading and even visiting Zappos there to figure out what their culture is like and how we can take ours to the next level. I came back energized… with loads of ideas ready for implementation. I recruited some Nuffies to help implement some of these ideas and the first one was implemented just last week.
It’s called the Nuffie Hero’s Wall.
When I was in the US, Shorty gave me an article to read about how people get motivated at work. One of those things apart from money and all is recognition and show of gratitude for a good job done. In many Asian companies though, the culture is very much stick more than carrot. So if you do a bad job you almost always get scolding but if you do a good job you may not get recognized or praised for it right?
I realize that happens in our company too and I’ve been guilty of that myself. So I came up with the idea of this Nuffie Heroes Wall. Where Nuffies can leave “thank you” notes for any0ne in the company that they think has helped them or made a difference for them be it at work or even personally. It could be “thank you for staying up late last night and helping me with this project” or “thank you for helping me get through my break-up”.
This will be put up for everyone to see and every two months we clear the board to make space for new notes and the old notes get passed on to the relevant Nuffie for that person to keep. When we put this idea together we weren’t sure how many people in the company would actually use it but wow the response was great. So much that we had to make more space for each month on the board.
There are many other initiatives we have planned but that will come in the following months. So as to not introduce too many things too quickly for the 160 Nuffies in our organization.
On another note Red Bull was really nice to give us a fridge that will be stocked up periodically with Red Bull. They dropped us a mail one day and said they identified the Nuffies as “key opinion leaders” so they all gave us one. Thank you RED BULL!
And finally last week our whole company took a Thursday afternoon off and we went Disco Skating.
I had not skated in 10 years or so but man was that fun to pick up again.
Some of us like Nic Chay here had never skated before so he struggled a bit.
But for most of the time we had Nuffies who knew how to skate coach and help the Nuffies that didn’t. It was good fun.Ok gotta go now guys. Catching a plane to Philippines now for the NuffnangX preview there. See you guys soon.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space