Where Are We Eating?

I took last week off as a gift to myself. I graduated with my PhD last month, and after 26 years of schooling it seemed like a small staycation was in order. If I’m being totally honest though, it dawned on me that now that I’m finally done with school, I would never (ever!) get a summer break again…so this week off kind of softened the blow!

My mom — who is the most hardworking human I know — always told me, “Work to live! Don’t live to work,” and it goes without saying that I really, really like living. Sure, maybe it’s cliché, like, “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” The cool thing, though, is that I do love what I do, and the key reason I love what I do is because of one thing: It’s fun.

As a user experience researcher at Verizon Connect, not only do I get to talk to people all the time about what they like, what they don’t like, and how we can help to make their experience as awesome as possible…I get to do these things as part of a world class (and incredibly fun) research team. And who is our fearless leader? Who consistently champions the importance of research? Who is the trailblazer of the most fun team? You guessed it: Mayank Sharma!

Our “Fearless Leader of Fun”, Mayank, trusts us, which is one reason we’re able to have so much fun. Because of his leadership style and the amount of trust he puts into each of us, we’re encouraged (and supported) to explore, think differently, and have fun doing it. I mean, we have an entire Medium series devoted to Mayank…how fun is that?!

In all seriousness though, things seem better when they’re fun. That’s not to say that we don’t have hard days on the research team — we do — but that’s part of the process, and it’s easier to get through the hard days when the overall job itself is generally fun. So, how do we foster fun? It helps that we genuinely like one another! We do a lot of little things that make a big impact on our day-to-day. We have a little prize bucket for each time we finish a research project, we share (and make) silly memes constantly, we insert totally random pop-culture references into conversations without warning, we get coffee with each other daily, we play trivia together, we have a lot of fun at Costco together during our lunch hour…we get out of the office. That’s not to say that the office isn’t fun — it is, especially when your office chair is a giant bean bag — but getting out of the office is an easy way to switch up the scenery, get some sunlight (yay, vitamin D!), and make “work” feel less like “work”.

Because we have so much fun together — but more importantly, because we’re encouraged by our Fearless Leader, Mayank, to have fun — we have great camaraderie. Having camaraderie allows us as researchers to feel comfortable providing constructive feedback to each other, and to our stakeholders. It opens lines of communication, and it fosters trust. Fun and a sense of unity lead to feeling comfortable sharing difficult truths because we know we have each other’s backs.

It’s because of this camaraderie that I love my job so much. The camaraderie we have developed and fostered together as a team has helped to make me a more confident researcher, and a more helpful colleague. Some people might think that “work” and “fun” are mutually exclusive; for me, it’s really important that they align because I do my best work when I’m having fun. On that note…where are we eating?!

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