Welcoming company culture & stronger sense of belonging

“I've personally found Mystery Coffee to be a great tool to make those random connections that we all used to make in offices.
Helps me to get out of my bubble.”

Kelly Goetsch
Chief Strategy Officer commercetools

Challenge

commercetools is the fastest growing ecommerce software vendor in the market, having added more than 200 employees in the past year.
We had to find a way to stay connected and engaged through this growth, particularly during office closures due to covid and a significant increase in the number of remote workers around the globe.

In addition, commercetools promotes a strong culture of diversity, employing more than 50 nationalities worldwide who speak more than 34 different languages. To ensure that everyone feels welcome and part of the company, we needed to find a solution to strengthen a sense of belonging - because every expanding company knows that diversity does not work without inclusion.

commercetools not only believes that it is crucial to connect our colleagues across teams and locations for team building and belonging purposes, but we also realize a great benefit from promoting and supporting this diverse workforce. Our employees exchange ideas and thoughts about how to address business challenges while connecting on a personal level and experiencing new viewpoints, and continually seeking ways to enhance our company culture.
Despite hyper-growth, we want to let our people know that the individual values shared by our employees contribute to a stronger culture and fuel a growth mindset.

Solution

commercetools believes that each employee plays a vital part in the company’s success story and strives to unlock the potential of every single person.
We provide our employees with a learning budget for books, training, and coaching for personal and professional training and growth, as well as language courses.
However, commercetools also believes that formal training is not enough. Sharing this knowledge with colleagues is the key to further growth, mutual support, and a great culture.

Humans are social by nature and need interaction with others to grow and be happy, and the company strongly believes that our people are our biggest assets.

Mystery Coffee is the ideal solution for us to bring commercetools colleagues together for a casual exchange. Our employees are matched independently of teams, departments, and locations - every two, four, or eight weeks - and everyone has the opportunity to participate and learn more about each other, our hobbies and interests, passions and ideas, but also about our roles in the company.
Like a personal coffee break, our colleagues get to know the person sitting on the other side of the screen whom they might otherwise only see in meetings or may never have met in a work call or in person at all.

Impact

Mystery Coffee has a great impact on our goal of creating connections across teams and time zones - regardless of nationality, gender, or background and strengthens the sense of belonging among each other.
In addition, the coffee breaks support the onboarding process by facilitating the integration of new team members into the entire company - especially those who start and work remotely. Getting to know colleagues and feeling comfortable in the new work environment is a critical part of a successful onboarding process, and Mystery Coffee facilitates just that: new colleagues have the opportunity to casually meet long-time or other recently started colleagues and make personal contacts.

In addition, cross-departmental matching helps our employees gain insight into other departments and understand their contribution to our company and its long-term growth and success.

Building personal relationships without the typical "watercooler" in the office is difficult, so it's even more rewarding to see that through Mystery Coffee, employees are building great internal connections, learning from each other, and supporting each other - connections that may never have never fallen into place.
This shows how this program positively affects our company culture and how we grow closer together even through this phase of hyper-growth and remote work.

With the help of the Mystery Coffee platform since its launch 12 months ago, commercetools has connected more than 160 employees and facilitated over 840 matches from all over the world, from Los Angeles to Sydney.

About commercetools
Munich-based commercetools is a technology disruptor delivering an industry-leading eCommerce SaaS solution. Today, some of the world’s most iconic brands trust commercetools to enable their digital customer experiences. As the visionaries leading the modern MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) architecture movement, commercetools gives companies the agility to innovate and iterate on the fly, merge on and off-line channels, drive revenue, and future proof their business.

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