Habi Hour S3 Episode 6: Culture Changers

Overview

11 February 2022 | 28 min and 39s

Internships are usually one-way: the company dictates what, when, and how interns learn. But what if companies trusted interns more and engaged them as co-designers instead of just passive receivers of their internship programs? Nikki Vergara of Positive Workplaces returns to Episode 6 to share how self-determined and autonomous interns took ownership of their internship experience, and became Culture Changers in their organization.

Transcript

Opening

Gerson: Do you have Tiktok now, Nikki? [Laughs]

Nikki: No! [Laughs] I can’t! But they are handling those areas that I cannot do. [Giggles]

MUSIC: [Habi Hour Intro]

[busy office sounds]

JPaul (voice over): Internships, or what we commonly call as On the Job Trainings, OJT for short, have been valuable avenues for students to gain firsthand experience and learn relevant skills in their fields. Interns usually follow a predetermined program set by companies: predetermined tasks, predetermined schedules, even predetermined outcomes. But what if we look at internships as a learning experience that can be co-designed where the interns play a more active role in shaping their internship experience?

I’m JPaul, a learning experience designer from Habi Education Lab. In this episode of Habi Hour, we’ll explore how well-designed internship experiences can positively influence the next generation of the Filipino workforce and reshape the future of workplace culture. Let’s listen to Gerson interview Nikki Vergara of Positive Workplaces!

Gerson: Maybe Nikki, let’s start by just doing an introduction. How do you usually introduce yourself when you guest on podcasts or webinars?

[Upbeat music]

Nikki: Hi, everyone! I am Nikki. I’m the chief well-being officer and the co-founder of Positive Workplaces. Our mission is to co-create cultures that enhance the well-being of the Filipino workforce.

Gerson: I wonder, Nikki, did you have internships before? Were you an intern also in other organizations? And how did those past experiences influence your internship program?

Nikki: It’s a great question, and I don’t know if you expect this answer right now, but my first ever internship was actually with your mom, right? I was an intern. 

Gerson: Oh I didn’t know!

Nikki: I was! I interned in college. 

Gerson: Ah, internship pala ’yun. Ok, ok.

Nikki: Yes, yes. That was my first ever internship and that really, that dictated the kind of supervisor that I am right now. I wanted to be just like your mom because from the very start she gave me so much autonomy. I asked her, “What am I expected to do here?” And my expectation of a typical internship experience is, you know, they make the coffee, they do the photocopying, they will do the stapling, all of the work that nobody else wanted to do. The dirty work, that was my expectation. But from the very start she told me, “Draft a plan, make it a proposal and then let’s go over it together.”

Gerson: Shout out to my mom in heaven who influenced you. Nice, ano? That’s was really great. Thank you, Nikki. I didn’t actually know that that was an internship. I thought that was a volunteer engagement lang.

Interesting Nikki when you were introducing yourself, I think you mentioned ‘culture’ two or three times. So what is it about culture, team culture, organizational culture that interests you the most?

Nikki: The thing with culture is, it’s the underlying assumptions of why things are the way that they are. Whenever we create interventions, oftentimes we think that, “Oh this is really going to make an impact,” but sometimes it just make just a change for a moment and it doesn’t last because it didn’t really affect the culture or the deep foundations of why things are the way they are. And so when I want to make a lasting impact, I really believe it’s through changing cultures.

Building the Culture Changers Internship Program

[light guitar strums]

Gerson: In this episode now is to take a peek into the Positive Workplaces internship program, which is also titled Culture Changers. Maybe you can share a bit also. Ano ’yung kuwento behind it? How did it start? How did you build the culture changers program?

Nikki: When I began Positive Workplaces, I imagined that it would just be me and my business partner doing everything—creating the content, running the trainings, and developing a sales pipeline. But then when the pandemic happened, a lot of people were kind of caught off guard—they lost their plans, they didn’t know what to do. And a serendipitous thing was my sister, who just graduated, asked me “Hey Nikki, I have some friends. They’re not doing much right now. All of their plans have been canceled. Do you think they can work with you and learn from you?” And I don’t have an internship program, okay? I’m not looking for interns right now. But she said, “Why don’t you just talk to them?” And so I did. I interviewed two of her friends and also my mom’s friends son, and they became the first three interns of Positive Workplaces. And it just really snowballed from there, because they saw that, “Oh we need to up our marketing” but we didn’t have the skills. So they said, “Ok. I’m gonna look for more people and I’m just going to tell them to intern with us.” Or I gave a talk at an event and a random question that I got in the end was do I have an internship program and can they apply, and I never spoke about an internship program. So it all was just a miraculous event where everyone was coming to me offering their services as an intern, and I figured, “Oka. Why not. [Laughs] Let’s do this!”

Gerson: I wonder if you can share to our listeners briefly what does the internship journey look like in Culture Changers in Positive Workplaces

Nikki: It all begins with the application process where people apply for the internship. There are different tracks. We have training and development, where you can expect to be designing webinars or workshops. We have marketing. They’re gonna be focusing on how to get the message of positive workplaces out there. We have research and development. They do research, create new products, and we also have a new unit now, a new track. It’s talent management. So if you wanted to take a dive into understanding strategic HR then that’s the track for them. So they will choose a track, and then they will be given a performance assessment. If they pass a performance assessment and the interview, they will then be admitted to the Culture Changers program. We start off with the on boarding. Everybody meets each other on Zoom Everybody meets each other. and everyone is given an opportunity to discuss why they decided to work in Positive Workplaces. What are they hoping for. And this one I also took from Habi: everybody else gets to explain what the culture is here in Positive Workplaces. All the existing interns or employees get to say what our culture is  here. Throughout the internship program, they are assigned a project. In the last phase of their internship program, they pitch a project to us about how they think they can help us reach our organizational objectives.

I have seen the most impressive projects that I could have never dreamed of on my own, and it was initiated by the interns during the last phase of their internship, thinking about how they can help us reach our organizational objectives.

Autonomy

Gerson: I wonder, how does autonomy factor in when you were designing the activities or when you were designing the overall program for Culture Changers?

Nikki: So it’s a huge factor because I’m just – like your mom, I always ask them “hey, what do you think you can contribute here?” I didn’t have this set of tasks that I wanted to offload. I always ask people, “What are your big goals, and what are the things that you want to do here? How can we align?” And the internship program itself was created by two of our first interns. So they designed the whole thing, the whole experience. It was so haphazardly put together when I was leading it because, as I told you, it came to me by surprise, so I didn’t have a plan or an intention for it. But these two interns, Chloe and Ji, they wanted to enhance their experience and make it better for future interns. So they made it more organized—from onboarding to engagement activities, to mentorship sessions, to exit interviews, and finally their graduation—they designed the entire experience to make it better for the succeeding interns.

Gerson: What are the challenges to providing autonomy to interns or to students or to beginners, based also on what you’ve seen in other organizations that you work with, perhaps, or observations that you’ve seen?

Nikki: I think a  lot of people are afraid of giving people autonomy because they fear that people don’t know what they’re doing, or they fear that people will do it wrong, or they feel that their way is the best way. I think with me, I’ve always been surrounded by youth who showed such great potential. I’ve always believed in, if you give people the right conditions, if you give people the right support, they themselves will come up with the best ideas and will be able to direct and lead the program. That’s why I give a lot of autonomy. I have so much trust, and I also learned that from you and from Habi, that if you just trust the process, give people the space to express themselves and express their ideas, we eventually come up with better output than what I would have come up with just on my own.

Gerson: I wonder if there has been any interns that felt that there was too much trust or too much autonomy?

Nikki: Yeah! I feel that everyone is a little afraid of autonomy because they’re afraid of letting people down or disappointing, especially in our culture in the Philippines where there is high authority, and people always telling you exactly but you have to do. Workplaces are typically very high in compliance culture in the Philippines, so there is a lot of fear and nervousness about dictating your own path and telling the leaders, “This is what we are going to do, even if I am just an intern. This is the direction we should go.” So we have a lot of conversations around that, where they get to express those fears, and we were able to guide each other through it. So I asked them where those fears are coming from. And a lot of times I hear that it’s coming from self doubt. They don’t know if their idea is great. They don’t know if they will be able to execute it. But what I always tell everyone is, because we’re together, we can guide that idea and give feedback, so that it becomes a useful and relevant project, and we’re able to help each other along the process. So that at any point you feel like your skills or your knowledge is not enough, that’s the beauty of being in a team—you can actually tap on so many people to help you out.

Gerson: How can organizations start to offer this trust more? How can organizations start to build this culture of trust and autonomy, and like you said doing it together, this sense of connection, togetherness?

Nikki: Yeah. Maybe I can geek out a little bit. I studied a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology in Australia where we really focused on well being science and all the different frameworks of well being. Among all those frameworks my favorite has always been the Self-Determination theory. So for our audience, the Self-Determination theory was created by [Richard] Ryan and [Edward] Deci, and they were two researchers who were so interested in motivation—What are the factors that keep people motivated? And through their research what they learned is you are not the one who sparks motivation in another person. It’s not up to you to put that fire in another; that fire, that drive is always in every person, it’s inherent in every being and all that we have to do is to provide the facilitative conditions so that this spark of motivation will keep continuing, and that’s what I always tell myself. whenever I’m in fear or in doubt—Is this gonna work out? Do we have enough skills? I just always think, “Okay, I don’t have to have all of the answers for what we do here or what’s going to happen next, but all I can do is create facilitative conditions for everyone.”

[Pensive music]

Nikki: And they’ve identified 3: so there is autonomy—giving people the freedom to direct their own path, allowing people to express their voice. There is relatedness—making everybody feel like they belong, making everyone feel like they are loved and cared for. And the last one is competence—having that experience of mastery over the things you are doing. So we can focus on each of those elements, when we think about designing an internship experience or even a work experience for other people.

JPaul (voice over): Autonomy, relatedness, and competence. These, according to the Self-determination theory, are key elements that must be provided to interns for that fire within them to spark. Nikki already talked about the first one, autonomy, earlier. Here’s she is again sharing about the next one.

Relatedness

Nikki: I think we can start off first with the biggest and most robust predictor of well being, it is relatedness. Especially in our context, Filipinos find relationships incredibly uplifting and meaningful, so it’s a big source of well being and a big factor in keeping people motivated and driven. And one of the practices I kind of grabbed from Habi were check-ins. It’s so important in helping people feel like they are loved and that they are cared for, to not go straight into the agenda, but instead to acknowledge people as human beings who are bringing themselves to those meetings. So I’m super grateful, Gerson, that you introduced check ins-to us.

Gerson: I wonder how do you talk to organizations who are quite averse to the idea of relatedness and belonging as something that is important, as something that they have to include? How do you convince other organizations to add relatedness as a key principle in their internship programs?

Nikki: I guess even if not a lot of organizations have that experience of people asking how you are before a meeting and after meeting, everyone has an experience of feeling seen, being validated and heard when someone asks them how they are. And if that small gesture of checking in on someone has that huge impact on them, why would you deprive that experience from other people? And I guess the fear is that it’s gonna turn into a long chikahan session and it’s gonna eat up all of the meeting time. But if we’re able to model that this can be as short as five minutes at the start and at the end, and if we show them ways to do quicker check-ins, and we show them how valuable it is, then people are less averse to trying it out.

JPaul (voice over): What, then, can schools and teachers do to play a better role in designing internship programs in their schools?

Nikki: I think if they start with a foundation, which is helping their students or the interns set a direction for themselves, then they would be able to make the matching process better. I think a lot of the times, interns just jump into any open opportunity, they don’t realize the matching process is two-way; it’s not just you begging for an internship from an organization. The organization has to be aligned to what you want, what skills you want to build, what culture you want to experience, what kind of people you want to surround yourselves with. And I think if schools gave students a clearer picture, or guided them through getting to know themselves more, what skills they want to build, what workplace they want to be part of in the future, then the internship would be more student-centric. It’s not about them fulfilling their OJT or their practicum hours. It’s about them using this as an experience so that they get to know themselves better and experience a workplace of their dreams, so that they can continue pursuing that and creating that for others.

Gerson: A workplace of your dreams. I love that, Nikki.

Competence

Gerson: I wonder about competency then, Nikki. What does that look like in an internship program, in the journey and how does the project sort of help competency? How does competency actually factor into the projects that they pitch?

Nikki: Something we do at the very start of the program, I didn’t get to mention, is everybody takes strengths assessments, and they will have one on ones with me about their strengths—understanding it and how they can apply it in work. Again, I wouldn’t have been able to get this far in my journey, if I hadn’t been learning from Clifton and Bernice particularly who are in Habi and who helped me set up that strengths-based culture in Positive Workplaces. So that’s been such a huge turning point for all of the interns. I think we are also coming from a culture where we focus on our weaknesses, and that’s going to be our pathway towards growth, addressing our weaknesses. In Positive Workplaces, they get a glimpse of using their strengths as the pathway towards reaching success, becoming a better person. I think a lot of times interns say, “I didn’t realize this was my strength”, or “I didn’t realize people valued this as well, it just came so naturally to me”, and us putting terms on their strengths, learning about each other’s strengths has been such a huge factor in helping everyone to feel that they have something to contribute, and that they are good at something that we really need for the world to see.

Closing and Synthesis

Gerson:

How do you assess the internship program? Because usually there’s an element of how many hours did you do? What’s the recommendation that you got from your supervisor? etc.

Nikki: Well, for the interns who take it under the more formal path, that their school is making it a requirement, then the usual assessment is we will grade their performance based on the skills that they were able to show and the projects that they were able to execute. But I guess throughout, we also have something we call an individual development plan, where every intern identifies what are the competencies that they want to build and what are the experiences that they need to build those competencies. And we’ll just keep checking. Are you able to build these skills and competencies? Are we able to give you the space and the support so that you can learn these things? That’s how we continuously check ourselves.

Gerson: Off the record Nikki, do you have a favorite intern? Or do you have memorable interns?

Nikki: They are all memorable!!! I’m that kind of person. I see the wonder and the uniqueness in each and everyone, it’s just impossible for me to have a favorite. They are all great. They all have contributed significantly to the growth of Positive Workplaces, and I remember all of them and all of their stories.

Gerson: Okay, so we won’t edit this out. That’s a wonderful statement to be included in the podcast! And Nikki, I guess, trying to wrap up lang. I’m curious. I also like how you described the whole internship experience, when the interview is actually at the beginning—how you design the interview as well, the onboarding itself, like you mentioned is also part of the experience. Throughout the 8 batches that you’ve had with culture changers, how has it evolved or how has it changed?

Nikki: I definitely think it’s more structured now, from back when it was a serendipitous event that people were just asking, “Hey, can I be your intern?” And I didn’t know what task to give them, I didn’t know how to set meetings with them. When could I talk to them? How much time would they be giving to the internship experience? But as our interns, our first interns have turned this into a project, they’ve made it so much more structured. They have recommendations for how many mentorship sessions each intern should take. They have unit heads now that each person can reach out to if they needed feedback, if they needed more guidance. They also created a more structured schedule. And for me, that’s the reason why Monday is actually my favorite day of the week. Monday is my favorite day because the whole morning is dedicated to spending time with interns, learning from their learning sessions, talking to each other and having fun with each other. So that’s been more structured. We’ve been more intentional about making the experience complete, engaging, and fun for them. And now it’s something that is institutionalized in Positive Workplaces because of that structure.

Gerson: So you mentioned that you enjoy spending time with interns on Mondays. I wonder what do you get out of it, spending time with the interns in doing the internship program, you as as Nikki, as an individual?

Nikki: I think it’s just such a good reminder, whenever I’m with them, that the youth have so much ideas, They’re worth listening to as early as now. Sometimes we tell them, “You know, grow up first, get a sense of the world, gain more experiences, and that’s when we’ll listen to you.” For me, when I’m with them, I realize there’s always so much wisdom coming from them. There’s a lot of reverse mentoring that happens, especially in the digital age or in a pandemic where we have to be using digital tools a lot. I’m learning so many applications and tools that I would have never come across if it hadn’t been for them. I’m learning so much about how we can better reach out to our audiences. I’m learning so much about technical skills even about being a good supervisor or creating positive workplaces. I learned so much from them and that’s what I realized when I’m with them. Right where they are, they have so much to contribute. They have so much wisdom and it’s worth listening to them.

Gerson: Thank you very, very, very much for spending your time with us. As a closing, how can we get in touch with Positive Workplaces? And are you opening up a new wave of internship programs anytime soon?

Nikki: Yes, it’s actually a regular cycle. So for anyone who’s curious about our internship program, we’ll always have our announcements on our website. That’s www.positiveworkplaces.org or on our Facebook page, just look for Positive Workplaces PH.

Gerson: Thank you, Nikki for spending time with us and for sharing your stories about internships. I learned a lot, and it was a pleasure.

Nikki: Thanks so much, Gerson, and thank you for sharing all of those best practices in Habi which I’ve then adopted in positive workplaces.

Gerson: Thank you. Very, very welcome.

MUSIC: [Habi Hour Outro]

JPaul (voice over): Culture is an integrated pattern of human behavior that can influence the way we communicate, work, and interact with each other. Like culture in workplaces, the traditional way of internship journeys plays a vital role on how people do their jobs. Internship experiences can be designed with the foundation of autonomy, relatedness, and competence. By providing them enough space to direct their own path and grow with it, we will soon realize that trying a new way of doing things is something interns, schools, and companies can all benefit from.

Gerson (voice over): This episode was written, edited, and produced by Habi Education Lab. Original theme music by Howard Luistro. For more Habi Hour episodes, follow us on Spotify, Anchor, Google Podcasts, or visit https://habieducationlab.org/habihour. Salamat sa pakikinig. Thanks for listening.