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Pizza Sessions

October 2016, Coolblue is a young company, we like to learn. In our work, from our colleagues, and in educational settings like workshops and classrooms. Learning is what motivates us; what makes us happy to work at Coolblue.

Grab a slice

At the same time, we’re actively recruiting new colleagues. Through our workshops, we get them up and running as quickly as possible. But after a while, we all like to become better at our jobs, better in our (inter)personal skills, or see if we can grow into senior position and contribute even more.

For Coolblue as a company, it is very beneficial that we carefully cultivate this mindset. This willingness to learn is what makes people more effective and motivated. Because we’re rapidly growing, we need more people with leadership skills. So, training ourselves in personal efficiency and leadership skills sounds like a good plan. In this blog, I would like to tell you about one of the initiatives that we have taken in this area.

PIZZA & BOOKS

We’ve organized pizza sessions. What is a pizza session, you ask? A pizza session is an informal meeting between 5 to 8 Coolblueians, outside of office hours. During the session, we’ll enjoy some delicious pizza while discussing the content of an interesting book. We’ll also engage in some self-assessment. Either way, you’ll have something to chew on. At the moment, we have three variants. A combination of DISC assessment (William Moulton Marston) and The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey). A team-orientated session about The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni), along with the assessment that is included in the book. And, last but not least, a session about Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman), which is our most recent one and includes an exercise of own making.



Pizza sessions start at 17:00, and end at 19:30. Usually, we start off with the assessments, as it helps bring the group closer together. After that, we discuss the theory of the book, supported by a presentation. Throughout the presentation, we’ll perform several exercises that help us understand the theory. Naturally, we’ll also discuss the results among each other. Oh, and before I forget, there’s pizza as well. Usually around 18:00.

Each topics is divided into two sessions. This way, we can start off the second session by discussing what we’ve learned during the first one. It’s also the perfect moment to share how we’ve put our learnings into practice.

So far, we’ve organized 22 pizza sessions, during which we’ve eaten around 110 pizza’s. And we’re planning to organize even more sessions. We started doing this in the IT Department of Coolblue, but due to its success, it quickly spread to the whole of Coolblue. The sessions are, of course, voluntary and take place outside of working hours. And, as we often do, we’ve asked for feedback with via a Google form. And guess what? Our pizza sessions are a great success!

As you probably already know, we always try to make our customers happy. But sometimes, investing some time into makings ourselves happy can be good thing too!