[three-minute read]
On Thursday afternoon at Oats Overnight, our team gathers for a weekly ‘Frideas’ meeting. As you might have guessed, this meeting used to take place on Fridays, but we liked the name too much to change it.
Everyone is welcome at Frideas on the condition that you come to the table with an open mind and a willingness to share your thoughts, both positive and constructive alike. It's one of the concrete ways we practice emotional thoughtfulness as a core rhythm of our team. An open forum for us to ask questions, invite new directions and initiatives within the company, and help each other solve problems with cross-functional input from different members of our team.
There are no bad ideas at Frideas. It’s also a space where we place value on dissent. Getting different opinions from your team can feel a bit like pulling teeth. But in the spirit of the open forum, we’ve created a space where anyone can feel empowered to challenge a thought or an idea, no matter who raises it.
Placing Value On Different Opinions
It can be hard to speak up when your supervisor or members of the leadership team are listening. It’s rightfully intimidating to share an opinion that clashes with people who have been at the company longer, and who know its inner workings on a deeper level.
But that’s also the magic of Frideas. We encourage constructive feedback, not for the sake of argument, but as a way to challenge ourselves and each other to be the best damn company we can be.
Innovation isn’t something that has to come from the top down. Instead, we’ve created a space where anyone can openly share their passion and unique life experience to help make us better.
As fun as it would be to list out all the great ideas that started at this weekly meeting, there’s an element of privacy at play. Everything we discuss at Frideas, stays at Frideas. In large part to help protect the integrity of the meeting. We want to maintain a safe and open forum for discussion.
But it’s true that we have some big ideas in the works that were first raised at Frideas. Because when you give an equal voice to all the incredible people on our team, and when you allow people to speak on their passions - even if it creates dissonance with our current ways of operating, that’s where the magic happens. We hope you stay tuned over the next few months as some of these big ideas come to life.
Emotional Thoughtfulness
At Oats Overnight, we come to work every day as we are. Not one of us is perfect, nor do we have all the answers to our problems. But by encouraging a culture of emotional thoughtfulness, we can ensure every person on our team feels valued. We nurture new ways of thinking that help us, and those around us, grow together.
These intangibles are often undervalued compared to the hard skills we bring to the table. But in practice, it’s emotional thoughtfulness that guides our growth, our innovation as a business, and the meaningful relationships that have formed within the company.
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