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The Charm of Working in a Small Organisation

Intro: Do you think you would have joined Google in the late 90s or Facebook in early 2000?

Counting my full-time internship at the start of my career as real work (which it was), this is my 26th year in the job market.  During this period, I have been in and out of 16 organisations, including one I owned very briefly.  That makes it an average of less than two years in each. Like most of those little inconvenient truths we know about ourselves, this remained a minor background noise, a bit annoying but harmless.  During a recent job interview, the head of a very large media house pointed this out to me.  I shrugged it off with a half-hearted explanation barely slipping through my lips. But her observation was correct, and it lingered in my mind.

Couple of months after this counter-cathartic interview, I landed in Yorke Communications.  I am the Chief Storyteller here.  I know that is what I know how to do and want to do it for the rest of my working life.  The job title was a throw-in by my employers, I suppose to keep the precariously flickering journalist in me a little happy.

What first drew me toward Yorke is worth a mention here.  I liked the questions I was asked in the interview.  They were not just intelligent and worthy of the mental effort in trying to answer, they were honest and to the point.  “Sometimes clients may want something that may seem terribly irrational to you.  How would you deal with it?”   Or sample this: “What if the client doesn’t care if you are an experienced journalist and rejects what you write?”

I also felt there was more to this line of questioning than just salt-of-the-earth honesty. I think I was being schooled on how things work in the real world with an intention of finding out how I would deal with them.  At this point I had a slightly better deal (money-wise) from a similar job offer from a multinational.  I knew I had to think this through objectively and make the smartest move possible.  At back of my mind, I was also running the scene from the Steven Spielberg movie Munich, where an army officer tells a prospective recruit he plans to send on a dangerous mission, “If you can’t decide in one day, you can’t decide at all.”

And so, I decided to join a small company with around 30 people (90% of whom are below 30) and conveyed my apologies to a multinational company with hundreds of employees spread across the world.  I told myself, at least I was not embarking on a “dangerous mission.”

It is now a little over two months since I joined Yorke and I don’t think I have had a happier honeymoon period in any place I worked before.

Our primary business is storytelling. But that doesn’t quite describe what we do.  It is akin to saying Reliance Industries produces lots of gas. Yes, we tell stories but what is equally important is how we do it.  We work with a wide range of clients from technology to telecom giants to a global water pump brand.  Each of these have stories to tell and the audiences for each of these may seem deceptively homogenous.  Also from Social Media to blogs to custom made videos to a full suite of Digital Marketing services, the range of platforms is as diverse as the stories we tell.

There are days I have seen the boundaries of our work blur when we took on the challenge of creating content-based assets around a visiting CEO of a US-based tech giant.  We are now working with a new financial services client that wants to minimise employee turnover with a stronger internal communication pitch, while we are also helping tell stories of commitment of an ecommerce client that delivered Diwali sales by literally swimming through flooded roads in Bangalore.

The bottom-line is this: no two days are same at Yorke.  The other day, a colleague of mine, still in her 20s said she had left her last job because it got too easy.  Or another, a former journalist, who said rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful got mundane after a point.  Our head of digital marketing Hrishikesh Shivanna who has spent more than five years at Yorke puts it more clearly – every three months what we knew is out of the window anyway.  In other words, there is no short supply of challenges at Yorke.

Above all else what makes it special for me at Yorke is the semi-formal work environment.  There are no particular work rules i.e. the Dos and Don’ts or as another young colleague put it, freedom to do things the way she wants them done.

As we head towards our 9th anniversary, we are clearly aware of the next big growth phase ahead of us.  The market for content is clearly coming on its own, thanks to the exploding social media and the impending collapse of old media ideas to reach target audiences.  This is also perhaps the best time to be at Yorke and the good news is that we are hiring.

If you are looking for more reasons to come and work with us here are some.  I am not sure if we have an affirmative hiring policy towards women, but currently we are pretty much evenly balanced out between the two genders.  We have engineers, journalists, B-school graduates and communication experts wandering about our office, creating and delivering content set on merciless deadlines.  We also try and meet outside of work for a group huddle and re-charge once every three to six months.  And we don’t believe in motivational posters at work.

The post The Charm of Working in a Small Organisation appeared first on Yorke Communications.



This post first appeared on Enjoy Free Video Calling On Android Phone, please read the originial post: here

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The Charm of Working in a Small Organisation

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