Jennie Rogerson, Global Head of People at Canva
In some workplaces, kindness is still seen as a weakness. As if being kind means being "soft," indecisive, or you’re not able to deliver great work or handle tough situations. In reality, if done well, kindness can be one of your greatest strengths.
It has been a turbulent few years for many people around the world. It feels like a day doesn’t go by without hearing something awful in the news or in the lives of those around us. Amidst turbulence, kindness can make a huge difference to others and ourselves, particularly in the workplace.
Kindness isn’t something that just makes us happy. It’s deeper than that – it’s good for us and for those around us. Kindness improves all kinds of wellbeing. At work, acts of kindness can improve relationships, and reduce stress and anxiety. Simply receiving a kudos message can improve our contentment, and over time, acts like these can work together to minimize burnout.
At Canva, kindness is woven into one of our core values: Be a Good Human, which guides our actions, decisions and interactions with our team, community and product. At a recent All Hands, our COO said: "We’re all just a bunch of humans trying to do our best with our own dreams, struggles and complexities," and we see it’s often the little kindnesses that people value the most while dealing with all of the normal day-to-day things we all handle.
At work, being kind doesn’t cost anything. Making kindness part of our everyday actions, communications and interactions with others, as well as ourselves, can have an outsized impact in spreading kindness, positivity and collaboration across a whole organization.
While there’s much for us to learn and improve on, in this article, I’ll take you through some of the actions we’ve taken to plant seeds of kindness across our people experience in case it’s helpful to those looking for ideas on cultivating a culture of kindness at work.
Be intentionally inclusive
As the world becomes increasingly hybrid, inclusion is the bedrock of a kind environment where everyone, no matter how or where someone chooses to work, feels a sense of belonging.
Be considerate of global and remote teammates
Make it easy for people to contribute no matter where in the world they are. This can be as simple as recording meetings or sharing meeting notes with teammates in different timezones to make them feel a part of discussions and decision-making. When organizing events, think global and hybrid-first. Stream in-person events, arrange local events at offices around the world at a similar time, share a recording, or send gifts or notes to remote teammates to ensure everyone feels included worldwide.
Celebrate people all year round
Don’t just hand out acts of kindness when it feels timely or advantageous to do. This goes for creating a culture of belonging too. Foster moments of celebration and discussion on peak celebration days and across the year, including events with internal and external speakers, workshops and social events. For example, a group of Canvanauts recently hosted a community event at our Melbourne campus called Off-Season Queer Talks, which explored how to express queerness at work all-year round.
Show kindness even when it’s not easy
Remember that we’re all just humans juggling deadlines and sometimes weathering storms outside our control. No one is perfect and mistakes can happen. Even when it may not feel easy, genuine acts of kindness, big or small, can be the difference between someone having a good or not-so-good day.
Assume positive intent
It can be easy to lean away when things get difficult or when you’re unsure how to support someone. Remember that everyone’s circumstances are different and what’s happening in someone’s personal life can have a huge impact on how they feel and behave. Assume positive intent, listen, and communicate empathetically. Offer a helping hand to someone, even when you’re busy, or simply send a kind note or emoji to someone if they’re having a rough time or an off day.
Get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations
Be open to having tougher, or even what you may consider taboo, conversations at work. This might be on things like imposter syndrome, wellbeing or grief and loss. Make imposter syndrome a focus during things like onboarding (for example, we share this graph with new team members) or performance reviews to normalize people’s feelings of self-doubt when faced with new challenges.
Despite many of us being directly impacted, grief and loss is also another one of life’s challenges that can feel difficult to talk about at work. We often don’t know what to say if it happens to us, or how to comfort someone experiencing loss, and so we resort to giving people space or saying nothing at all. Creating dedicated support or resources on how to support team members experiencing grief and loss can go a long way in creating more human experiences to support each other. We’re sharing a template based on our grief and loss support guide as a resource you may want to use in building your own guide.
Communicate with care
The way we write or speak to each other plays an enormous role in setting the tone for a kind environment.
Active listening
Listen actively to seek to understand what your team loves about your culture and the areas of opportunity they see. Put regular cadences in place, such as People Pulse surveys twice a year or asking for feedback after “peak moments” such as onboarding, learning and development cycles or company-wide events.
Celebrate people’s impact
Recognize the impact of your team publicly and/or privately. Take the time to learn about how your team like to be recognized — I learned on a recent trip that our team in Manila prefer to be given kudos privately versus a public forum. Asking how people like recognition can be impactful. Share a kudos message with someone who’s gone above and beyond on a company #kudos Slack channel or share a personal thank you note from the heart.
Celebrate your team’s work and personal milestones (birthday, anniversary, engagement, citizenship) by sharing meaningful gifts, cards or decorating their desk. It’s often the little things that people remember the most, such as a funny video message or turning someone’s face into an emoji. We have a Recognition Hub where our team can go to find all kinds of simple and quirky ways to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of those around us.
Use inclusive language
As language evolves, it can feel difficult to know which words to use to respect, support, or make those around you feel valued. That’s where we’ve found an Inclusive Language Guide can help to support your team in choosing terms that are most applicable, and learning more about the differences in language from a unified internal source that is ever-updated. It can also mean a lot to people when you create a space to identify pronouns through things like job applications, Zoom backgrounds, Slack or your internal intranet.
Overall, I truly believe kindness is contagious, with one act of kindness having the power to inspire other acts of kindness, causing an ongoing cycle and taking on new forms of kindness along the way. Practicing kindness day-to-day places teams in the psychologically safe and inclusive environments they need to create, innovate and collaborate. Imagine if every single person you knew just did one kind thing today, what a wonderfully better and more inclusive world we’d live in.
About Jennie Rogerson
Jennie Rogerson is Global Head of People at Canva, a free online visual communication and collaboration platform with a mission to empower the whole world to design.
Since launching in 2013, Canva’s global community has grown to over 85 million monthly users in more than 190 countries and has created a total of more than 10 billion designs. In the last couple of years, as millions of people around the world embraced a hybrid way of working, Canva experienced its biggest period of hypergrowth yet and continues to go from strength to strength thanks to a global team of 3,000 people.
Jennie joined Canva in 2019 as the first person in Leadership Operations for Co-founders, and CEO and COO: Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht. Similar to a Chief of Staff role, Jennie wore many hats from strategic partner, cat herder, and dot connector, to the driver of many fun and interesting initiatives including Canva's Future of Work post-COVID approach to flexible work, Celebration of Diversity strategy, the Co-founders’ pledge to give a 30% stake of Canva to the Canva Foundation and creating Canva's Leadership Operations and Operations Business Partnering teams (currently 41 people around the world!).
Today, Jennie leads the People Group at Canva where she oversees a global team of 300 people who come together to dream up and create Canva’s unique team experience; from recruitment to alumni and everything in between. Prior to Canva, Jennie ran the operations at Order Ahead platform, Hey You.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.