When I was a Ph.D. student, there used to be a concept called Wednesday Tea Time. One day a week, we would take a break from our insanely rigorous course/research work/qualifier prep-ridden 16-hour days to meet the whole department at 4 pm. But the best part of tea time was that along with the ‘tea’ there would be department-sponsored ‘cake’. Needless to say, for poor graduate students like us; this was a luxury! We would all come out of our basement offices and for an hour, enjoy the tea and cakes. And all our professors would also make their way down from their offices to try to get to the cakes before we finished them all.
The second best part of tea time was the conversations we would get to have with our professors. During this one hour they would transform from scary mathematicians into joking, caring, simple men (we had no female mathematician professors). Being academicians, conversations were typically explanations of complex problems we didn’t quite grasp in a seminar or discussions about new research topics. Mostly, they were silly math jokes.
But those were some of the best learning experiences I had in four years of my graduate life. I learned many interesting mathematical concepts in that simple cake-filled learning atmosphere, and ways of thinking that taught me how to think clearly about a problem throughout my professional career.
I have always wanted to do the same for Serein – create a simple environment of learning. We often attend events where we listen to only a handful of speakers and often, they speak on the same subjects. But how often do you get to learn the realities of small companies? Challenges faced by HR with limited resources, even if they have the right intentions?
Serein’s recent meet and greet event was just the right mix of fun + learning + knowledge sharing. We are thankful to so many of our partners who joined us. We have known many of our partners for 5+ years and have been part of their journey of building their companies. Many of them have slowly become more than clients or collaborators. Many are now friends who we wait to have a cup of coffee with, share our ups and downs, life events of our children and so much more. And every time we meet, I learn a lot from them, their knowledge and their daily challenges.
On this day, a few interesting things that we discussed:
- How do you talk about inclusion beyond gender when there is so much to be done wrt. gender itself?
- When a hiring manager brings up the “diversity candidate vs. I-believe-only-in-meritocracy” argument, how do you reason with them as a DEI practitioner?
The best part of the afternoon was our participants telling us that instead of feeling overwhelmed, like they haven’t achieved much – they felt that they have found a group of people, just like them, who are facing the same challenges. And they want to come back to learn more about how their new friends are going to solve those challenges. The positivity behind this statement is what we really work for!
I was recently asked where I see Serein in the next 5 years – it is this – to bring good people, knowledgeable people together who can learn, collaborate and work together without competition to make small changes – not just in the workplace but in society as well. If Serein can facilitate that in any way, our real work is done!
