Hello from the land of exotic night market food, Poy-sian inhaler and chatuchak! It’s Kara, your constant companion in this website blog. As you can see, I am currently relaxed at my seat.

Okay, that was really about a month ago. 😅

Which means it was also a month ago when we updated our company’s core values!

Let me take a couple steps back, and start from Day 2 of our BKK trip. (Hey, check out the rest of our adventures in BKK in this blog post!)

Day 2:

August 30

All Hands Meeting at Monstar Hub Cafe

Our company trip doubled as 1) an opportunity for everyone to meet personally and bond, and 2) a avenue to discuss future plans and new directions for the company moving forward. It was both exciting (hello, innovation! hello, growth!) and frightening (why good day, added workload! Hahaha kidding -- or not!) at the same time. While the managers were presenting their plans, you can feel the energy in the air heightened with every slide discussed. Sure, there’s pressure, but the right amount of pressure in a task is needed to get the ball rolling.

And so the ball kept rolling…

And then it was time for a quick break!

Aside from the plans + new directions, an important announcement was also shared during All Hands Meeting.

Our new core values.

When I entered YOYO last March, these were the company’s core values:

Ownership, Professionalism, and One-For-All

6 months in, and we have added 3 more:

Humility, Respect, and Trust

Personally, I love our additional core values. I feel that it has captured even more how we value collaborative teamwork, camaraderie, the “I got your back!” attitude, and how we set importance to equality in the midst of rich diversity within the company, not only in race, culture, communication style, but most especially in setting the HUMILITY, RESPECT, and TRUST in every individual’s way of achieving growth and healthy working relationship among team members.

Plus, it helps that we already like to make the “finger-heart” gesture to each other to express our appreciation, so adapting to this new core values was a piece of heart-shaped cake.

We also had team building activities towards the end of the session. If you haven’t played the APPLE, ORANGE, BANANA game during one of your company’s team building initiatives, YOU ARE MISSING OUT. Hahahaha seriously though, look it up and suggest away to your HR! :)

Our team work was also tested during a collaborative storytelling team challenge where each member will recall a memory based on a word, and would have to connect it to the other members’ memories to create a solid storyline.

It was confusing at first -- but so much fun!

And then the ultimate teamwork challenge came in papers with task you cannot share to the other teams (there were about 3 teams). The catch? You have to work with the rest of the team to accomplish the task.

You can imagine the chaos (and competitive spirit!) that transpired during that moment.

But hey, we still did okay! Good job, team!

Ah, good times, good times.

Looking forward to our 2020 All Hands Meeting in……(secret!) Hahaha

Humility, Respect, and Trust to all,

Kara