By Lucy McCarthy, Operations Manager at Hive Business

During some recent interviews for Hive I was asked by one of the candidates: do you like your job?

I could honestly answer yes, I do like my job. I’m lucky that I get to work with people who understand how obsessed I am with my dog, appreciate my love of Christmas and ultimately always push me to do better. I have days where I don’t enjoy elements of my role, like most people, but working at Hive is never dull and is always fulfilling.

It’s not just that I enjoy my job but at Hive, we work hard to ensure we have a good ‘company culture’. I know it sounds like it could be like a sketch from The Office where we all go around the room and share something about ourselves but we try and make the culture something that happens naturally and isn’t forced.

I was telling a client about our plans to celebrate Hive’s birthday; like we do every year. Our client was saying she wanted to do something nice with her team too but couldn’t find a weekend that everyone was free. When I told her that we were taking everyone out of the office during work hours, to spend the afternoon focused on Hive, she was surprised and asked what we were doing with the team.

WHAT WE DID FOR OUR BIRTHDAY
Our office is bright yellow and we have an array of “artwork” on our walls along with colourful post-its for our agile boards. At the birthday, we created four posters to represent Hive, one for each category:

• Culture
• Future
• Learning
• Commercial

The team were put into groups to produce a creative brief for our designer Marta to work from. Everyone got involved and now, when people come into the office, each team member can explain what the posters mean. We then had food and a few drinks (of course!). We also had a beautiful view of Malpas river and the sun was shining for us too.

We regularly take time out of the day-to-day routine to allow everyone the space to be creative and be part of the plans for the business’ future – be it deciding what goes on the wall, to new services we should be providing our dental clients.

When was the last time your whole team were in a room together? Was it positive? Did you get the most out of the time you spent? If you would like to discuss your team dynamics, get in touch.