Another Friendsurance year - a reflection of gratefulness
Friendsurance’s 7th year comes to an end and in the middle of our xmas party I came to reflect upon it - it was a year we can be proud of and grateful for. At that point I thought: “What a great bunch of people, I don’t express enough how grateful I am for working with them”.
Our year started with good prospects of great new business opportunities and this soon turned out to be a reality that has occupied us for the whole year. Like with everything new; it brings inspiration, new views on things, it brings discussions, frustration and some pain, but it also forces general improvement. Looking back we ended up improving how we work together, we challenged what we can get done and we grew a lot as company. Lisa summed it well up in a middle of a complex project with many frustrated parties said: “ I find this personally quite a frustrating process, but it makes us improve and afterwards we will be much fitter for things like this”. Some months later a new cooperation partner expressed to one of the CEOs how impressed he was by Lisa’s professional way of making the cooperation supersmooth. Clearly she was right, we grew stronger and benefited from the earlier frustration.
Another thing that makes me grateful is the initiative and responsibility feeling that lies within the team. With big projects dominating our OKRs, there were other important topics that got less prio. One important topic that I believe engages a lot of team members was picked up and pragmatically pushed by Bernadette. It is still not live, but when it is - a toast to you, Bernie!
We had to do a lot of recruiting this year, with in total almost 50 new team members – and we truly did well. Not because the HR team rocks, but because we as a company recruited as one team and had a huge amount of internal referrals that made some of our best and fastest hires possible. What is great about it is not only that we got the team members we needed, but that the team supported the company in general. Many could be mentioned but, in particular Mario, Olaf, Gor, Eduardo F., Brian, Sebastian L, Lisa, Lukas and Carlos - you clearly went the extra mile for the team!
With all the recruiting going on, there are of course a lot of new people. After only a few weeks together it is hard to remember how it was without them. I think what makes the new team members this year so special is how smoothly they integrated and how much drive, knowledge and also humour they brought with them. My favourite reflection on that was perhaps the day I realised that the cool kids of the company work in IT.
Through our 7 years there have of course been social peaks and social downs, and I think this year we have had some real double rainbow moments in the office. Why is that? Well it is the small things that turn out to be big things. A good example is that we could enjoy freshly baked banana bread several times this year because our two lovely team members Clara and Anne have taken use of the soon to be retired bananas and turned them into a morning surprise for everyone. There has generally been so much cake in the kitchen from team members, that we should be glad people do so much sport in and outside of the office. Another example is the amount of creative initiatives people in the team in general take - heavy competitive table tennis tournaments are perhaps the absolute winners among them. Thank you Anton & Anton!
As a grand final of this year I was grateful that the HR-team were allowed to throw a heck of a Christmas party. Thanks to Herr and Frau Margulies in Prop-House Berlin, we got an evening in the surreal Bauakademie. And thanks to our friend Alexander Klebe, we got the nice pictures in this article. In the yearly Christmas speech from the founders, CEO Tim Kunde reflected that in a year of quite ugly nationalistic trends in the world - we can look back on a year where combinations of people from over 20 nations worked together with joy, totally ignorant of the international conflicts. As he said: Friendsurance is like a global village with people from Iran and Israel, from the US and Russia, even from East and West Germany [pointing to Sebastian, the other CEO, and himself] who work together for a joint goal.
In the end, it is a not a good year if you have not laughed a lot. My best fit of laughter was caused by Simon. As a young mom with a very tight schedule I don’t get to eat with the others in the social area very often. As I for once were able to join - Simon noticed and wanted to comment on this fact. His words came out a bit different though “Oh, you? That is a unpopular face here in the kitchen”. I think we both turned quite red before we laughed, more or less for the rest of the lunch.
Thanks for a great year Friendsurance! More to conquer with a smile in 2018!
