Seamless Transitions

We have always had conversations at the office about it being a fun place for everyone to work at.

How would productive work happen unless you enjoy the environment you are working in?

We talk about how we can make our office better, conversations about fixing the garden keeps coming up, there are talks about coffee machines, music systems and bringing an Xbox into the office

But beyond all of the little additions we could add to the office, the employees obviously matter a lot as well. We like to have a lively environment - conversations floating around, people pulling eachother's legs, cracking jokes.

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Today, Ritika got back to office after about a month to visit all of us. It was an exciting event - she commented on the design development, she cracked jokes on Arjun (who thankfully took it quite well) and went around talking about everything at office. It was a fun visit both for her and for us. She was also whining about the fact that she didn't get the chance to handle the official Instagram page for the office. 

Ritika was an intern who completed her internship last month, Arjun is one who just joined - but their conversations went like they worked with eachother for ages. 

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Knowingly or unknowingly, the process of picking the interns on it's own has become a method of streamlining and picking Interns who would fit into this team.

We start with an informal mail to the interns who are shortlisted, describing our office and the team to each one. As the first step of the selection, we ask them to describe themselves - what do they do in their spare times, do they like to travel, what is their background like? The answers to these are very diverse - we have found a couple of answers which end in two lines, or some that tells stories. Don't expect us to remember your answers, there are way too many coming in! But based on these answers, we shortlist the interns who can get into the next stage of the selection process - the telephonic interview.

Everyone at office fights to get into the space where the calls are made. The calls are made randomly, mostly catching these prospective interns at surprise. We inform them that they are on speaker, and that a few others are listening to them. This phone call, being quite informal, is one where along with their Architectural skills, we look at how they take the conversation forward, how they handle the crowd attention and how they take humor.

So after this process and a lot of fun conversations in the office WhatsApp group before they join, the interns when they finally physically join the office, knows how exactly the office is like and blends in perfectly! So after a month of silence when the new interns finally join the office, they fill in the gap left by the old ones quite beautifully - and from day 1, the conversations fill the room again.