One might argue that what makes a company stand out is not its assets, but rather it is its culture. It is the spirit of the company reflected on how employees feel and interact with each other and with customers that really matter. wasl is certainly aware of this, and have been doing a brilliant job in encouraging innovation and supporting employees happiness.
I am lucky to be a member of the innovation committee at wasl, and I appreciate the ideas’ platform that the company has been curating for years to encourage innovation. The program runs under the name of “wasl challenge” and poses different challenges for employees to come up with solutions under a different theme each round. One of the challenges we posted last year was designed to gather ideas that would help increase the level of happiness among employees.
Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest ones. A colleague from our finance team, Ms. Esra Saleh, submitted a very smart idea last year. Her suggestion was to develop what she called “Happiness Cards” and to distribute these cards among employees. The "Happiness Cards" carry encouraging and nice message that employees can share between themselves after adding their own personalized message on top of it. It was a simple idea and easy to implement. Thus, we arranged for a proper design for the cards and distributed a set of 8 cards to each employee in the company. We also uploaded a digital version of the cards onto our internal portal so that employees can print more of them whenever they need to. The cards were an instant hit. Everyone was happy and surprised with the nice gesture and they all started exchanging cards showing their appreciation to their fellow colleagues.
I remember the first card I received had the message “If only there were two like you” and a personalized hand-written note thanking me for the support I provided my colleague on that day. I also remember giving one card to my manager with the message “Thank you, you made my day!” and complimented it with a big heart drawing and a smile face - of course that was the day we received the yearly bonus! During the year, I gave away and also received many other cards. Messages like “You were creative today”, “I am proud of you”, ‘Thank you for your continuous support” provided nice gestures and helped to raise our morals and appreciation for each other.
This year, we decided to update these beautiful cards with a new design and refreshed messages to keep this smart idea going.
For wasl, and to go with the occasion of writing this blog post, I would love to give the card “I’m proud of you”.
And for my fellow colleagues, I would say, “I really appreciate you”.
- Submitted by Fadi Zaghmout, Digital Marketing and Social Media Specialist
