“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
– Mark Twain
As a kid, I was lucky enough to have my grandparents living nearby, so I saw them often. My mother’s father didn’t like his job very much, and he spent most days longing for his next vacation. My father, by contrast, loved his job. While we took vacations as a family, my father didn’t spend his time wishing he was someplace else, and the last day or two of vacation wasn’t wasted dreading the return to the office.
Even as a kid, it became clear to me that my father had it right and my grandfather did not.
The famous Mark Twain quote at the top of this post was the best way I could think of describing how I strive to manage both my own career and our company. It is my incredible honor to announce that our team agrees with this approach, confirmed by the fact that we were named to Denver Business Journal’s Best Places to Work list for 2022.
It’s no coincidence this award comes on the heels of two awards that recognize our work, rather than the workplace: The PR Agency of the Year Award from Business Intelligence and the Best Tech Campaign from PR Daily. That level of consistent excellence will only come from a team that truly enjoys what they do.
At Comprise, we believe there are two important reasons why the work is better when the team members are happy. First is the obvious benefit of simply enjoying what you do from 9 to 5. That involves developing a culture of mutual respect and trust, as well as supporting one another to produce consistently excellent work. But just as important, if not more so, is enjoying your work enough to be genuinely curious about developments in the market even when you’re not “on the clock.” Everyone who has interviewed with me has likely heard me say, “if you’re not looking forward to spending part of your evening watching the latest Apple Keynote on your Apple TV while downloading apps on your phone and checking to see when preorders open for the new hardware Tim Cook and company are announcing, you might not fit in here.”
A joke, to be sure. But like most jokes, there’s a hint of truth in the humor. If you don’t really enjoy what you do, you’ll tune out as soon as you leave the office. Some of our very best ideas have come from someone finding a story that relates to one of our clients. In many cases, they didn’t find the story when doing a morning headline search. Instead, the person was reading things they were interested in that happen to impact our clients — because they like what they do. Sometimes, the find comes from a team member who doesn’t even work directly on that client, but they share the find with their teammates. Those moments of serendipity can’t happen if every member of the team is waiting for the day to end so they can turn their attention to topics they find more interesting. That’s why we look for people who think IoT is interesting, that AI is pretty cool and that blockchain has potential.
Of course, we all read for leisure, have long talks about the last episode of “Succession” or “Dateline,” see our fair share of a wide variety of live music, and run or ride bikes in our off time. But we’ve also found jobs that we genuinely enjoy, and it shows in our work.
By building a culture of like-minded people — we actually kind of like it when someone calls us geeks — we are better able to unearth trends and stories that can help our clients tell their stories in the most effective way possible.
As it turns out, that also makes for a pretty good place to work.
