A Kick-off in Riga

Since April this year, I’ve been working part time at a large IT-company. The company provides business software and IT related development and consultancy, which is a big market with many actors. Even though my company is targeting many different niche markets in order to get specialized customer segments, start-ups still pops up everywhere, and sometimes, the start-ups succeed by having a better value proposition. One recent example is a young man living Ireland, who within a year managed to dominant the market with his company. He offered the customers a product that was easier and faster to install. It only took a few minutes with a cloud based technology, while the other companies within the same marked had to wait months in order to install their product, since they didn’t use cloud.

In other words, there are many competing products on the market, and there are many ways for a firm to handle this competing products and companies. However, my company handles these by buying them. I would say that it’s an effective method.

Still, this brings up new challenges for the company. Merging our company with others can create some difficulty in creating a team spirit for the employees and make sure that all of us are working as one. Therefore, I was assigned to plan a kick-off for the whole department (with over 200 employees) in Riga, with the theme “Feedback”. The whole department had never met all together before, nor did they understand what products and teams were included in the department, since there were many new smaller companies merging into one.

With the help of two other colleagues, we managed to plan this kick-off with different lecturers during the day, and banquets during the evening. I would say over all that this was a great experience, and I had learned a lot. One lecture that I liked the most was about feedback by Stefan Gunnarsson, who is a PhD doctorate at the University of Debry, and consults organizations about feedback. He talked about every employee’s responsibility of creating a good team spirit, and that this responsibility usually is put on HR or the managers, but everyone contributes to it. Since I have been working close to HR these pasts months, I could not agree more. Many do have expectations of their HR or their manager to create a great company culture, but everyone in it must contribute of course. Feedback is not only given and received form the manager, but also colleagues to colleagues.

Shared below are pictures from this kick-off.