Hi everyone! My name is Emma, and I’m a member of the Global Operations Team (GOT), which mainly provides translation and interpretation support at Mercari!

You may have read past Mercan articles about Mercari’s efforts to bridge language and cultural gaps within the office—not only my team (GOT), but also the Language Education Team (LET) and the Diversity & Inclusion Team (D&I). We’ve always worked closely together, but at the beginning of this year, we formed our own organization called Global People Operations, or “GPops” for short. As GPops, we are working towards a global Mercari. And recently, we had our very first full-team offsite!

GOT has had offsites before (like the one in this article ), but because we provide translation and interpretation support that can be vital to other teams in their work, we’ve always had some team members stay behind in the office. This time, we declared a “no GOT afternoon”, giving us a chance to get out of the office as a team while encouraging teams that usually use our support to make more effort to communicate on their own without relying on interpretation. (Don’t worry, we gave plenty of notice and made sure we weren’t missing anything vital!)

So what did we do at the offsite? The offsite took place at the end of the quarter, so we took the time to look back at our progress and achievements from the past three months, before moving on to talk about how we can adjust our direction and goals for the next quarter.

Each team presented quantitative data (the number of translations, the number of people who participated in events, etc.), which gave a very clear picture of the effects our work has in the company. Personally, while I had an idea of what the other teams in GPops were working on, I hadn’t seen the results, so I thought it was really interesting to see how successful they’ve been! Of course, not everything went as expected, but hey, that’s why we adjust as we go, right? After seeing all the teams’ results and discussing the overall direction for our language and cultural support in the next quarter, we broke into teams and drafted new objectives.

But wait, there’s more! As a break from the serious business work, we also had a surprise design challenge, where we were broken up into groups and given the task of designing a sticker for GPops, to be used in the office.

We had 30 minutes to create a design with the theme of “diverse and inclusive Mercari activist”. With some skilled artists in our midst (other members, not me) and even some unexpected digital art entries, we ended up with some really cute designs! Rather than voting at the offsite, we decided to open up the voting to the whole company, and the winner will be turned into an actual sticker. I’m super excited to see the results!

All in all, it was a great chance to get out of the office and take a step back from our daily work to focus on our long-term strategies and what we can do for the company this quarter, plus have some fun while we’re at it. We came back to work the next day refocused and ready to go!

GPops has a lot of fun initiatives and activities planned, and I hope to keep everyone updated right here on Mercan.

See you again for more #MercariDays!