Voodling Voodle’s Culture

April 17, 2020

As a compendium to my post about Voodle’s evolving culture and company values, let me share how we are using Voodle, to voodle, about our Voodle culture.

Human-X-Shares During COVID 2020

A simple and very compelling use of voodles that has really brought our team together has been the posts we have made showing our life-at-home experiences during COVID Spring 2020. These are trying times, and being able to understand, see, hear, and feel a bit more connected to the experiences of others in our group, has been amazing.

Rachel on working at home with her daughter

Several of our team are parents of children and we have met each other’s families at various company events over the years. Voodles present a different insight about the challenges of working from home with kids that are also trapped indoors. Apart from the many stressful negatives of being trapped at home, we took the time to think about the positives–Rachel’s time to connect and share with her daughter is a great example.

This is an example of a voodle about our culture shared by Rachel, who highlights a positive of being socially isolated at home with her family.

Forest on what books we have been reading

Among our team we have often talked about film, books, art, and other personal passions. With voodle we have been posting more detailed updates on what we have been reading, watching, and doing to stay sane. I was thrilled to find out that the book i’ve been tackling is also on the reading list of some colleagues, and look forward to discussing with them once i get through this monster!

This is an example of a voodle about our culture posted by me, “what book are you reading”.

Jessica on her home-office setup

With Zoom and other video meetings we all get to see the background of our home-offices, but what about a real tour with a walk-through of the working environment. I had only been to a few of the homes before, but through this series of voodles, i have a personal sense of the space/place that everyone in the team is operating from these days.

This is an example of a voodle about our culture shared by Jessica, when we shared “show us your home office” among our team.

Sharing Inspiration

Tamara on a “aha” moment

Our team has traditionally been a work-at-office culture, with a lot of “watercooler” moments over coffee, walks in the neighborhood, or chats over a desk. Challenged by COVID work from home dynamics, Voodle has allowed us to share “aha moments” as voodles. Here’s one from Tamara, a meta-aha-moment, about using Voodle to make voodles to share these ideas. This led to Aaron’s blog post on the voodle-water-cooler.

This is an example of a voodle about our culture shared by Tamara, who shared a “aha moment” she had that led to a blog post by her, and to a “challenge” where many others on the team responded to her idea with their own versions/iterations.

Transparency

Aaron update from board meeting

Our culture has always valued transparency and we typically share all the core-information about our board meetings, funding and financial situation, overall business progress, and more. Since we started using Voodle internally we’ve made voodle-posts about information we want everyone to have access to. Here’s a example, Aaron’s post right after a board meeting where we showed our first progress in building Voodle.

This is an example of a voodle about our culture shared by Aaron, who shared a detailed update after our March board of directors meeting. Aaron’s personalized delivery of the update, was more compelling than a pure text/slack post.