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Eat, Pray, Lob
Lob Culture
November 3, 2014

Eat, Pray, Lob

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by 
Harry Zhang

As we grow our team at Lob, we've been thinking a lot about the environment we want to foster for our team. We've thought about our engineering and design process, recruiting, team bonding events, office setup/layout, and a whole lot more.

As our team grows, it is important to us to preserve the parts of Lob's culture that we love. Through our conversations over the last couple of months, we've realized how important employee health and wellness is to our team.

Here are some simple things we've put in place to ensure that our team stays healthy and happy as we grow:

Team Building and Celebrating Success

At Lob, we aim to have one team bonding event every month. Previous events have included Escape the Room, Urban Putt, and even cooking classes!

This brings the team together for bonding, and also lets us celebrate our successes. We know that it can be tiring and it's important that we get out and have a great time with the people who are in the trenches working hard every day.

Healthy Snacks and Meals

Lob always keeps the fridge stocked with drinks and plenty of healthy snacks so that we always have options.

Everyone adds their favorite snack to our team food order every week. I always make sure we're stocked with almond milk, peanut butter, and quest bars; you know, the essentials!

Our focus is on making sure that Lob provides healthy alternatives to your standard snack foods. We believe that eating healthy is an important part of ensuring you feel great every day. While energy drinks can get you through a long night, we aren't encouraging folks to load up on junk food/drinks! Ultimately by providing healthy options we can ensure that everyone is productive, happy, and energized.

Exercise Stipend

Regular exercise improves mood, boosts energy, and promotes better sleep to name just a few things. Getting some physical activity in does wonders for your health, especially for us desk workers!

To emphasize the importance of exercise at Lob, we provide employees with two options:

  1. A fitness stipend - enough to cover the cost of most gyms. That said, we know some people prefer other forms of fitness (bouldering, yoga, martial arts, dance, etc.) so we keep our definition of fitness flexible. In fact, many of our employees participate in a variety of physical activities to keep things interesting.
  2. Unlimited classes at Barry's Bootcamp - take classes during the week at Barry’s and Lob will cover it! This is hands-down my favorite perk at Lob. Barry’s is across the street from Lob’s office and provides the best workout in the city (I feel strongly about this). In addition to enjoying all the benefits associated with a great workout, I've found that that group workout classes with teammates is a great bonding experience.

Striking the Right Balance

As our company has grown, we've realized that the constant day to day grind can take a toll on folks. As such, Lob has put in multiple policies in place to make sure people are staying sane and take time off work as well!

Research has shown that working too much without taking vacation can be detrimental to your physical, mental, and work life. Everyone needs to set aside some time for themselves; that could mean taking time to travel, or to see family. We don't want people to burn out so we encourage taking a vacation every so often.

As such, we keep an open vacation policy and flexible hours. The focus for our employees is the amount of throughput and work that gets done. We believe that the priority should be getting work done on time, and, so long as that is being achieved, we want to make sure employees take time off for themselves as well. We want people to enjoy the time they spend at Lob, but also spend time with their loved ones and friends as well.

It's important to think about the values that are important to your company early on and to implement policies that ensure them. We've thought a lot about these policies and urge all companies to develop a Health and Wellness Program. If you have questions or concerns about what policies to implement or how to implement them, reach out to us!

Be sure to tweet at us if you or your company has tried anything similar or think we should add something else to our Health and Wellness program. We'd love your feedback!

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