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Our awesome Manila office

We travel a fair bit for our work and spend a lot of time with the clients—but we’re encouraged to work from our home office on Fridays.
Anna

Anna joined the firm as a senior business analyst with McKinsey Energy Insights. She works with our Performance Improvement team and is based out of Manila office. Before joining McKinsey, Anna worked as a drilling engineer in a multinational oil and gas company and obtained her MBA in Singapore. She loves coffee and dancing and is currently trying very hard to keep her sugar habit in check.

We travel a fair bit for our work and spend a lot of time with the clients—but we’re encouraged to work from our home office on Fridays. Today I’m writing about a fun Friday in the Manila office and the culture here. 

Manila is a pretty amazing office—we’re definitely not London or Singapore office in size, but being small has its perks. Everyone knows everyone, and we laugh—a lot. Office events mean a lot of jokes, competition, karaoke, and food while we wait out Friday night traffic. 

This particular in-office Friday event was dinner followed by a karaoke competition and a game of jeopardy. Our resident knowledge guy Justine created a game of jeopardy with the most interesting categories (Pop Culture, Vocabulary, Geography, among them) and split the office into three incredibly competitive teams who trash talked each other—all in good fun, of course.

The questions ranged from historic (“First country in the world to grant women the right to vote”) to fairly modern (“Who was the Philippine representative to Miss Universe 2012?”). I can still remember the Double Jeopardy question on which the results of the competition hung: "State the modern day country where the first man to orbit the earth came from." The answer: Kazakhstan. Who would have known? Martin, who was in my team, barely blinked as he cheerfully penned the answer—and we won easily. 

I included a photo of the winning team—and cheers to the amazing organizers who made the effort to pull people in for food, fun and a spirit of family. 

Anna