Week 1: Organizational Culture

Organizational Culture was something I was very interested in when interviewing with different companies. Even with Zoom Interviews, there were some companies that I knew I would not click with in terms of culture. After my first week at New York Life Investments, I have a feeling the culture and environment is meant for me. I throughly enjoyed meeting with my manager, the internship coordinators and other analysts this week. During orientation, the culture was something that was covered a lot. They incorporate their values into everything they do.

Because of the nature of my position (intern for the Office of the CEO), I will be deeply involved in HR type discussions and decisions. One of the programs run out of the OCEO (Office of the CEO) is the “One Team, One Purpose” initiative. This initiative is centered around 5 main commitments. The five commitments include: drive for results, take initiative, healthy debate, collaboration, and client orientation. The goal of the initiative is to encourage people to act in alignment with the core commitments. Coworkers can nominate one another if they witness or feel like their fellow coworker is exemplifying a commitment. Then, this coworker would receive a block. The block is a physical representation and reminder of the commitments that employees should aim to uphold. The block is usually kept on the desk of the recipient. They are awarded the block during a team meeting along with a written letter of how they are positively impacting the group and organization as a whole. NYLIM takes values and company culture very seriously. They hope that with the building block program they can encourage specific behaviors and trigger conversations around the core commitments which are what the executive leadership team deems important.

I will be working on a project next week that revolves around this building block/commitments program. There are so many nominations each month and currently there is no good way to digest and reflect upon all of the data. Such data includes: who nominated who, which department the nominee works for, which commitment they were nominated for and so on. The executive leadership team wants to be able to discuss and revise the initiatives, but with no easy way to capture it all they are struggling. I am going to sift through all of the data to see a multitude of things such as if there are certain initiatives that no one is nominating their coworkers for, if only one department is doing all of the nominating and another department never engages with the program and things of this nature. This will help NYLIM better focus on setting goals and standards for their internal company culture. I can’t wait to experience more of the culture by attending zoom meetings with different employees and working on this project.