This year for Valentine’s Day, we’re celebrating friendships! We spend so much time together that we’re bound to establish close ties with our colleagues. We identified six pairs that work especially close with one another, and asked them fun questions about their workplace relationship.
Keep reading for a closer look at two of GD’s favourite work duos!
Meet Jean-François and Melissa
Jean-François is Garage’s Director of Creative Services and Melissa is the banner’s Senior Manager of Marketing. They work in synergy to develop, implement and maintain Garage’s brand image through our various channels including photography (marketing campaigns), stores and transactional website.
Describe each other in one word.
JF: Melissa is smart.
Melissa: JF is organized.
What’s your colleague’s morning drink of choice?
JF: She has a latte.
Melissa: He likes water.
What makes your colleague such a good partner?
JF: She is always calm and doesn’t get overwhelmed easily. She is very dedicated. She’s an expert in what she does and works very well in collaboration with our teams. She adapts very well to any situation.
Melissa: JF is an amazing leader and colleague. His work experience and ability to adapt allows him to expertly guide his team through periods of change (which is the only constant at GDI!). His organization skills are unparalleled. What I appreciate most about JF is his ability to remain unfailingly positive, collaborative and dedicated even in the most challenging situations.
What’s your colleague’s bad work habit?
JF: She brings candy into the office… but we all love it…
Melissa: He eats the candy!
What was your favourite project that you worked on together recently?
JF: Reworking the Brand Book and developing a process for building campaigns with our respective teams.
Melissa: Our first official “omni-channel” seasonal campaign for Back to School 2016. We established a new way of approaching and developing campaigns. The resulting “Jeans You Love” campaign received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customer.
What’s the secret behind your successful collaboration?
Both: Team work, alignment and HAVING FUN!!
Meet Amineh and Yvan
Amineh is Senior Mobile Product Specialist and Yvan is Director of Product Management (PMO). She works on delivering an optimal customer experience through our digital platforms while Yvan’s primary responsibility is to ensure that the IT teams involved in GD’s technology projects are able to collaborate with the business teams to deliver the solutions requested by the organization.
Describe each other in one word.
Amineh: Yvan is collected.
Yvan: Amineh is passionate.
What’s your colleague’s morning drink of choice?
Amineh: He drinks coffee—always Starbucks. Yvan always comes in the morning with two coffees in a tray, one for him and one for a colleague.
Yvan: Olympico coffee—it’s her favourite!
What makes your colleague such a good partner?
Amineh: Yvan is always calm and optimistic. He can assess and isolate action plans in the face of arising issues to keep pushing the team forward. It’s always a pleasure to discuss with him about uncertainties. He keeps us motivated and looking to solutions.
Yvan: Amineh is able to stay sane in the face of what seems like an unending flow of design and user experience change requests. She welcomes change and understands that improving the experience is the key to our success.
What’s your colleague’s bad work habit?
Amineh: Yvan has chocolates/donuts at his desk. We are always tempted to grab something when visiting his office. That being said, I don’t know if it’s his bad habit or mine since I can’t resist…
Yvan: Amineh is perfect—no bad habits to report! (She had me sign a non-disclosure agreement so I wouldn’t be able to tell you anyway.)
What was your favourite project that you worked on together recently?
Amineh: The Garage and Dynamite loyalty programs as well as our soon-to-be-launched apps are the projects we worked on together. The complexity of them and all their elements really required us to work in sync to make sure we were always aligned. They wouldn’t have been a success without Yvan’s dedication, reliability and insights.
Yvan: I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to collaborate with her on the launch of our loyalty program. I love her energy and fresh perspective on pushing our customer experience to the next level. She’ll be a good ally in the future to turn inspirational ideas into reality.
What’s the secret behind your successful collaboration?
Amineh: I think we make a good team because we both care about the quality of work delivered. We can easily agree on the best experience we want to deliver to customers and find creative ways to make that happen even when we have challenges.
Yvan: I think that, first and foremost, we’re both motivated and enjoy getting s**t done. A problem, a bug, a bad delivery, criticism, or change of strategy, we both see those as bumps along the journey.
