“Work-Life Balance, Safe Spaces and Lots of Fun Are the Best Foundations”
Passionate about wellbeing, creative director Helen Hyung Choi, has taken up the additional role of company culture at Woodblock animation studio and production company. Having grown up with influences from a variety of cultures, Helen has always understood the impact that environment can have on a person’s beliefs.
Spending eight years as an artist and team lead in New York, Helen found herself burnt out in the city that never sleeps. Wanting to improve her work-life balance, she moved to Europe in the hopes of improving her wellbeing and now works to maintain a healthy company culture as the production studio grows.
In this interview, Helen Hyung Choi opens up about the influence of culture and reveals how Woodblock is maintaining its fun and creative personality as the company grows.
LBB> How did you come to work at Woodblock?
Helen Choi> I've been with Woodblock as a freelancer since 2013, but some of the members of the company I've known since the beginning of my career in New York. Eight years ago, when I moved to Berlin, it was my natural first step to contact them and I started freelancing. I then joined the company full time as an art director, and slowly my role grew to creative director.
Recently, I've also integrated wellbeing and company culture into my role. It’s been so great to be more involved in this aspect of our company, especially because it comes natural to me, even before it was officially my role. As our company grows, it’s important to have this support in place. It feels like a new chapter for Woodblock.
LBB> What was the company culture like before you first started in this role and what did you want to improve on?
Helen> As I was preparing for this interview, I talked to everyone in the company about how they felt about the company culture, and the values at Woodblock. Because a company’s culture doesn’t form from just one person making a difference. It comes naturally from the environment and how people shape it.
A lot of the answers I received were surprisingly well-aligned. A couple of keywords to describe Woodblock’s culture are family-like environment, always for teamwork, ego-free environment, and respect for one another. I think this comes from the fact that the founders of the company went to college together, and some core members of our team in Ludwigsburg also studied together. I am very lucky to have jumped into an already working healthy environment as I try to maintain what we have already with new members who are joining.
The main subject I am currently thinking a lot about is communication. What a vast topic that feels so generic to even mention and yet the difficulty of it seems to rip itself open in infinity if you so much as attempt to do it well. How do we talk to each other, in what tone, how do we relay the right information to facilitate everyone to do their best job, what structure of communication do we build to keep everyone in the loop in the most efficient manner? What does an impactful meeting look like, how do we minimise redundancy? How do we spend our precious time together meaningfully? These are some of the questions that are marinating in my mind. However, it will be a continued learning, a topic that will need constant tinkering and adapting as the company grows.
LBB> How do you ensure you maintain that healthy company culture as Woodblock grows?
Helen> I make sure I pay attention to the new members of the company so that their voices are heard too. It’s more than asking them how they are doing, because sometimes that doesn’t cut it. I ask if their workload is okay or about more specific aspects of their role. A lot of the time these things naturally fall into place, but it’s always good to ask people’s opinions on how things are going. Trust is built steadily.
Every company goes through ups and downs, whether it's workload or communication, so at Woodblock, we try to check in about how that is affecting the team and what support they need. It’s about constructive perspectives, diagnosing problems, and then coming up with fitting solutions together. My role is to gently nudge and open the conversations.
LBB> Why is wellbeing so close to your heart?
Helen> I had very bad burnout when I was working in New York eight years ago. I was living a workaholic, unbalanced life and that is not just down to my background and personality but down to the wider culture of New York too. The culture encourages you to be that way. This was a huge reason behind why I moved to Europe. I knew that culturally, Europe had such a different work mentality compared to the US or even Korea where I’m from.
Growing up there and moving to the US with my family when I was 15, I have seen how different cultural views and environments shape us and our behaviours. Therefore, coming to Europe was a very conscious decision in making sure that I had a good work-life balance.
I wanted to prevent burnout for myself and for others. Someone very close to me recently went through a burnout and this is crushing for me. However, it happens regardless of how hard people around you try to help you. It’s a trip for one, through a tunnel with pretty big blinders on. Only the person who is in it can help themselves and one can only hope that those blinders will fall off someday revealing other dimensions of realities.
As far as for myself currently, I can proudly say I have such great work-life balance compared to my New York days.
LBB> How did you handle culture and wellbeing during something as tough as the pandemic?
Helen> Everybody has such a different relationship to the pandemic and what they went through. At the end of the day, what it comes down to is respecting each other's belief system. Simply tolerating someone’s view is not enough, but putting in the hard work to hopefully get to a point to genuinely respect each other's belief system from near and afar.
Sometimes going in for social interaction is crucial for bonding, and then sometimes it helps to work from home and really concentrate. We’re quite flexible with how we work now.
Recently, we've had some wonderful silly nights where we hang out and drink beers together. Celebration and bonding are so important and if you can do it safely, do it. Like everyone else during the pandemic, we’ve also been engaging in digital hangouts. For example, every Tuesday night we do this thing called IP night, which brings more focus to the original content that we are creating at Woodblock. Tuesday evening, whether you're home or at the office, everybody logs in to a digital meeting room and we talk about different projects over beers. It’s a very safe, open space to voice our thoughts.
We also now have Friday 8am yoga class run by our very own executive producer Luiza Cruz-Flade and Diana Toro Posso, our graphic design artist, cooks for us a couple of times a week! I think eating a meal together is also such an important part of studio life and bonding. We just need wormholes to connect to our Ludwigsburg, LA, England, Marseille and Copenhagen team members so we can all eat together.
LBB> How do you feel that your company values and culture impact the creative output of the team?
Helen> If you have a healthy environment where people feel safe, then that's an environment where everybody feels like they can focus on doing the best work possible. If somebody is working in a toxic environment, so much of their energy will be occupied by processing those toxins.
To use the words of our team members, we have this collaborative family/friend environment where you feel like people are respecting you. Therefore, a good work-life balance is important. Making sure you have a great surrounding only helps.
