Thanksgiving and Recognising our Terrific Work Mates

Thirteen years ago - when we hired our now CEO, Chris Czarnosz, as a Training Manager, we agreed to embrace his "American" custom of having a Thanksgiving Lunch.

And this year we restarted the tradition after COVID imposed WFH prevented us getting together for the past few years.

What is Thanksgiving Lunch

Thanksgiving lunch is simply everyone bringing a plate of food to share and having lunch together. And our American friends add some traditional delicacies like turkey and pumpkin pie.

The catch ... we all take turns to stand up and share with one another what we are grateful for in our lives.

The big catch - our trainers are placed under a time limit so they don't speak all day !

What We Are Thankful For

Across 50 staff that attended Thanksgiving we had a wide variety of things that got mentioned - but there were 3 common themes:

Thanks that:

• we are all (mostly) healthy
• our families and friends are safe and in our lives
• we have a great bunch of work colleagues 

 and of course we were very grateful to all the cooks that contributed to the feast.

A Great Bunch of Work Mates

We have had a lot of staff change in the past 3 years and had the same challenges as many businesses, with:  new staff starting work from their lounge room; staff having to change working hours due to caring situations; some staff moving onto new challenges elsewhere; and having to do lots of recruitment activity to encourage people to make a career change and join our teams in uncertain times.

But the end result from that - we were still able to hire really, really, really nice people to join the really, really nice people we already had.

We hired people that get on well with one another; that respect (and enjoy) each others differences; that help one another out; and that - just "get on".

That's a hard thing to do in a challenging time - but it has paid dividends as it was one of the most commonly mentioned things at Thanksgiving (behind family of course). In fact, we are like a second family.

Thanksgiving is a tradition that we now embrace - even if its not helping with our summer diets.