Passion Projects

Being passionate about what you do, in and out of the office, improves your work and brings meaning to your life. It makes you more creative, gives you more energy and improves the final product. And it’s important to have fun at work – you spend a lot of time there.
In February, our Koch Comm team put one of our company values, passion, in the limelight and executed activities to promote the value internally. The activities encouraged showing passion throughout the month, inside and outside of the office. As a part of that focus, Koch Comm gave employees few hours to work on a “passion project” – something they’d wanted to find time to do but hadn’t (largely due to time). Some teammates worked on professional goals, others on personal goals. Whatever path they pursued, it was a reminder to us all to make time for our passions and for doing those things we want to do. Check out a few ways some of our team spent their passion project time.

BEING PASSIONATE ABOUT YOUR WORK DOESN’T MEAN BEING A WORKAHOLIC. BEING PASSIONATE ABOUT YOUR WORK AND OTHER INTERESTS IN YOUR LIFE IS ESSENTIAL FOR WORK-LIFE BALANCE.

“One of my passions is organization- both personally and professionally. I’ve come to realize in the past 6 months that my organization process for myself is paper in this digital world, and that my life was a cluster of notes, paper, post-its and countless to do lists everywhere. In this passion month, I took the initiative to spend my two hours obtaining Nozbe, an online organization system and setting it up (no easy feat and I’m still working on it). While it took a leap of hope (and some doubt) that Nozbe would work for me, coming into work each day seeing a (mostly) clean desk gives me a lot LESS anxiety than I used to have coming into work.” – Krista

“For my passion hours, I wanted to follow my passion for helping people. I volunteered for 2 hours at the YWCA in Oklahoma City spending time with moms who were victims of domestic violence. We created homemade sugar bath scrubs, did yoga, taught a class on how to make healthy snacks on a budget for their kids and helped them learn about and sign up for SNAP and WIC.” – Tracie

Too often, day-to-day (and life) tasks get in the way of following our passion. Distractions will always be a problem, and February’s exercise reminded us all how important it is to make more time for our passions. The month also gave us each the opportunity to reflect on those passions that led us into public relations, communications and marketing. Those are the passions that drive us to keep learning, keep doing great work for our clients and to keep growing as professionals and as people.

CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR

                  

Thomas Larson

Account Executive, PR