By Megan George
Communications Specialist
Making and Taking Culture Cues
with Matt Fuhrmeister
Do you remember that feeling after landing your first job out of college? For us, it was quite a thrill followed by some unwanted apprehension. Although you go through interview after interview to land a job, you can still be a bit uncertain what exactly it is you’ll be doing there. For us in particular, we knew we would be acting as contractors, using our learned skills and expertise from Local Wisdom at Janssen Pharmaceuticals. You get some funny responses when you tell people you’re a contractor. “Ugh what is that?! Do you work on houses?” At least this is the response we’ve gotten here and there. Hey, we know and understand the impact we make at our jobs. Working on site at a Fortune 500 Company like Janssen is quite the starter job, in our opinion, and we’re proud to boast that we bring out skills and expertise all the way from Local Wisdom.
HQ at its Finest
At Local Wisdom, in the little town of Lambertville, New Jersey, we can “come home”, hang out, hey maybe play some pool. We get the opportunity to see, listen, and learn about all that Local Wisdom has to offer and how that list is continuing to grow.
Maybe it’s the video games, the modern look and feel to the office, the few steps we have to take to go down town… It’s something we value, being able to visit HQ, as being off –site personnel and something we want to further educate all other off-site personnel about.
Defining Cultures and Making and Taking Culture Cues
One of the best advantages of coming from Local Wisdom is the ability to take the culture of working at the home base with you. That means valuing close collaboration, dynamic creativity, and expertise in developing novel digital and design properties – all tenets of Local Wisdom’s work – even in other industries or workspaces. As an “ambassador” of sorts for Local Wisdom, we’re able to make an impression on the way successful work is achieved at Janssen by sharing our abilities and best practices to support their own unique culture.
As their credo states, Janssen and all business done on their behalf must first and foremost bear “responsibility” to the “doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services,” and in “meeting their needs everything [done] must be of high quality.”[1] So, too, is high quality the aim of every Local Wisdom project and product, in the creation, design, and execution of their workflow. Just because UX design doesn’t seem to have much in common with the launch of a new medicine or imagining new ways to reach healthcare providers and patients, it doesn’t mean that the same critical, dynamic thinking does not apply from one to another. What’s more is that the creativity necessary for both areas is born of the same incentive: to impact an audience, or to truly reach a user, or even patient, in an impactful and dynamic way. The creativity and work ethic enforced by Local Wisdom allows us to operate and complement Janssen’s striving towards benefitting the wider world.
So Where Do We Belong?
It’s great to know how our two worlds collide and balance each other in terms of how we accomplish our work – but where can we call “home” if we find ourselves comfortable and afforded opportunity in both? The answer might not be in choosing only one place. Instead, we can enjoy the best of both worlds. At Janssen, we can directly see the impact of our work through the successes of patients and projects that are in the public eye. At Local Wisdom, we see creative work valued by the reputation we help to uphold and bolster, and through the innovative developments that we see our colleagues achieving in areas dramatically different than ours. Both work cultures fulfill different standards of our work – and working in each, sometimes with our minds steeped in the values of both at the same time, we’re proud to be able to call both places home!
[1] “Our Credo.” Janssen Pharmeceuticals, Inc. 27 Feb 2017. Web.
