In the latest installment of our Kanga Life interviews, we caught up with our Project Director, Philip, and talked all things team culture, maintaining a healthy work-life balance and ghosts…
What is your role at Kanga?
Project Director. I work with all the project managers to help deliver projects. It’s way more fun and exciting than I just made it sound! Great strategies require hands-on and flexible planning to implement, and I help the project management team deliver complex outcomes. It’s never dull!
What made you want to work for Kanga?
I knew and respected a number of Roos and leaped at the chance to take on some freelance work. When an opportunity to join permanently arose I had no hesitation at all in accepting. What enticed me was the people: my colleagues, nay, my friends!
How is Kanga different from your previous workplaces?
Every place I have ever worked pays lip service to ‘caring for employees’. At Kanga, this is baked into our ethos and culture, and we live and breathe it. We don’t do cliques or sniping; we genuinely like, appreciate and look out for each other! The quality of the work environment and the product we produce matter more to us than margins.
How would you describe the team?
We care. Both about each other and about the work we do. And we’re passionate about that work: the pharma industry exists to cure, heal, save, and we believe that the work we do matters.
What is your typical working day like?
In a word, interesting. Tomorrow I expect to come in and check the overnight emails from other time zones, then meet with members of the project management team. By mid-morning the day will have taken on a unique cadence and will involve addressing and resolving unexpected challenges. A smattering of meetings, internal and with clients, is fairly typical, and there are persistent team management tasks to take care of.
Sounds busy! So, how do you manage a healthy work-life balance?
I find that physically distancing myself from work channels outside of core hours ensures that I am not always on duty. I have a ‘work’ laptop that gets turned off on Friday evening and on again Monday morning, and a ‘fun’ laptop with no work channels that I use on weekends. During the week I work my core shift, then I leave my phone and laptop at my desk and spend time with the family. I don’t mind putting in extra hours here and there, but on the rare occasions it is necessary that I ensure extra hours are in response to a specific and real need.
How do you like to spend your free time?
As well as having a lovely family, I take on long-term hobby projects that absorb my attention. In summer I build things in my garden, such as patios, benches, stairways and topiary. It’s quite cluttered now! In winter it’s DIY, and my spare time on the weekends is taken up with playing chess, programming (Java) and writing.
What does Kanga do to support your work-life balance?
I am not encouraged to work excess hours, and if I do, my colleagues notice and intervene; and I do the same for them! Where someone is working more than their contracted hours it means one thing: that we are under-resourced. We work hard to ensure that we balance the workload, today and into the long term, with the amount of human resources needed to deliver it. It is simple really: if you have 10 people working for you then you have the capacity to deliver +/- 80 hours of work per day… not 160 hours!
What would be the one thing you’d say to any applicants for future job vacancies at Kanga?
Our culture is super inclusive and open. If you share our vision and values you will fit in well, and we will welcome you!
And finally, some quick fire questions!
Would you rather travel to the past or to the future?
The future. The tech is better there, and there’s less risk of an encounter with the grandfather paradox annihilating the universe.
Early bird or night owl?
Night owl 😊
Do you believe in ghosts?
“Ghosts” = No. But I don’t believe we, society, have the semantics to discuss this topic properly. There are phenomena that remain elusive to reason / science. There is still a lot we don’t understand. I believe that the things that people refer to as ghosts fit into this category.
