Week 2 at Cvent- organizational culture

My first week was all training and onboarding, this is the first response I am writing. But throughout these first 2 weeks, I have learned a lot about cvent as a company and what its values are. Cvent values mutual respect of others and relationships between people. We had a lot of training seminars about the values of Cvent and they really instilled in us that the most important part of a company is its people. Though it is hard for me to really experience this since the internship is totally virtual, I can definitely tell that most of the people who work at Cvent really enjoy it and enjoy working with the people around them. In the seminars, they talked about how during non-pandemic times they have company sports teams, a crazy holiday party, Halloween celebrations, and lots of volunteering.

Overall Cvent is a pretty informal organization. People can wear whatever they want to work as long as its work appropriate. On zoom, people wear t shirts, sweatshirts, and other comfortable clothes. During orientation, they told us to wear what we feel comfortable in whatever that may be. I choose to wear business casual tops just because I am an intern and I want to give them a good impression. This may change throughout the summer as I get more adjusted and used to the culture, but for now business casual is the way to go.

In terms of communication, it is also pretty informal. Though it depends on who you’re communicating with, we almost exclusively use slack for all communication. I used slack for my internship last summer as well as in professor Bezio’s class so I am pretty comfortable with slack. For all zoom meetings and such, we use Outlook so that we can attach meetings and have everything organized. Emails tend to be more formal and company-wide issues. For example, Salesforce was down this past week and we received emails telling us that. Personally, I communicate with my manager almost exclusively through slack. It is easier and quicker than trying to email back and forth.

Cvent was created in the tech bubble and the CEO Reggie has always prioritized relationships and employee prioritization. Since it is a software/ tech company it functions in a more low-key way prioritizing relationships between people. That being said, it is also a competitive industry so we are expected to be motivated and hard-working. The strengths of this are that people seem to be happy working at Cvent and when people are happy they are more efficient and excited to come to work. One of the weaknesses is that it is a hard balance to strike between relationships and innovation. In a high-pressure, fast-paced industry, innovation is key, and continuing to work hard is important to remain a leader in the industry. I think that Cvent does a good job at this but it is definitely hard to maintain a good balance. The pressure of being an industry leader can lead to a ‘shut up and work’ atmosphere which is very problematic. I think they should continue prioritizing company values during orientation so that all incoming employees are aware of how the company works.