A story about the first enjoy.ing years, written by our CEO Nenad Jović
It was 2015 in Belgrade. We’ve had enthusiasm, idea, great colleagues, friends, our clients’ trust and youngculture’s heritage.
Many thoughts, questions and ‟what if” concerns, but as they say, “luck follows the brave”. We had our clients and colleagues who trust us and helped us to achieve almost impossible! Five years later, this is the story about enjoy.ing, thrustful nearshoring partner, our people, projects, successes, and everything that modestly stands behind that English world.
For me personally enjoying can’t be expression determined by vocabulary’s definition ‟taking delight or pleasure in an activity or occasion”. Yes, it is a pleasure, but it is also a pride, triumph, future and much more.
In case you haven’t met enjoy.ing, now would be a good time.
enjoy.ing’s DNA
enjoy.ing originated from youngculture – strong and respectful company founded in early ‘00s. Luckily or not, but circumstances changed causing us to react and vary a bit.
Good news for at-that-time initiators and now managing team: 80% of youngculture colleagues trusted in our vision and decided to become enjoy.ing colleagues.
When it comes to fellow workers – there is one who could be real enjoy.ing chronicler. He started in 2004 as official number 1 employee, junior engineer at youngculture and now he’s successful and respectful Manager of the largest enjoy.ing squad.
Today, we’re hiring 250 co-workers in four offices at three locations – Belgrade (times two), Niš and Kragujevac and we’re more than happy to successfully implement distributed work at different lengths. Distance between two Belgrade offices is app. 200 meters and between Belgrade and Zurich is more than 1.200 km, but our colleagues’ performance is the same.
Our clients and partners are mostly from Switzerland, but we’re also doing business with the whole DACH region, Netherlands, Great Britain, Italy and else.
They’re distinguished by the industry, too.
We are well known and recognizable partner in airline industry. Working with Lufthansa and its daughter companies, we solidified in the field offering not only software development, but business services, too. The most of our people works for finances – e-banking, insurance, and comprehensive insurance. These, two sectors might be the biggest, but our creative people meet the needs of e-learning, e-commerce, packaging, telecommunications and even more.
How do they do that? Well, they’re smart, highly educated and trained to use over 200 technologies.
enjoy.ing is a mix of different subcultures. Someone loves basketball, others play violin, like to read, walk, extreme sports or running marathons and some just love movie marathons. We are compound of well-educated people blessed with youth curiosity and enthusiasm combine with pure experience and wisdom.
Together with NSM Engineering and youngculture, enjoy.ing is a part of NSM Group.
Stability is eternal, everything else is transient
During these 5 years (16 if we include youngulture) I’m proudest of stability we’re offering to our colleagues. Yes, we know, IT industry is all about creativity and innovations. That categories are essential, but without solid ground to lean on they are nothing more than catalysator to chaos. Stability is what make us feel secure and give us freedom and opportunity to dream and achieve great results.
What else make us great?
‟Open door” policy: Our managing team is always available for all colleagues. They can approach us, ask us whatever they want and share with us praises and critiques.
Open-mindedness: For example, our managing team doesn’t always have the same opinion, but we respect each other decisions. The most important thing is that all of us are looking towards the same direction. In unanimity, there is no going forward.
We’re not only geeks: you probably know the stereotype about programmers who’re looking at a screen and types keyboard for the whole day. Mentioned stereotype doesn’t apply to enjoy.ing colleagues nor developers in general. Our colleagues are made of engineering, families, friends, and hobbies. Some of our colleagues like extreme sports others are former professional sportsmen even representatives, musicians, professional military members, hunters, etc.
We, as company, strongly support their free time. We learn that in order to have good and happy employee you need to respect their private time and support them! That is why work-life balance principle is something we’re especially proud of.
And did you know that our colleagues made registration and mobile application for Belgrade marathon (http://www.bgdmarathon.org) and project Petlja (https://petlja.org) in their spare time?
What to expect from enjoy.ing?
Each new year, birthday, or an important anniversary, inevitably questions are: What is the plan? How is it going to be?
When it comes to enjoy.ing we plan to keep the same principles we took over from youngculture and we’ve been nurturing over these years. We want to stay true to our colleagues and clients, to support knowledge, education, talents, and good ideas.
Nearshoring is something we’re recognised for and it will definitely stay part of our business model. But, we want to expand it even further. I always say, my idea is to offer some expert service or product which will give an added value to our clients and existing business model.
However, new markets, new services, new colleagues and portfolio enlargement are our long-term goal.
Fun fact: Story of two “brothers”
My name is Nenad Jović and I am enjoy.ing CEO. My colleague is Nebojša Jović and he is NSM Group’s CSO. We are not brothers.
When I met him, 10 years ago, he gave me a business card. That is where we concluded we have the same surname.
At first, everyone thought we are brothers, and it was exhausting to explain over and over again to almost everyone we’re not brothers, but at some point, it became easier to just say: ‟Yes, we are”. Today we have one more “brother” with us, so it is much easier to explain coincidence.
At the end, I have to mention…
It would be unfair from me not to mentioned that success of enjoy.ing wouldn’t be possible without great people I work with! I have to say that my management team is my second family and I would not succeed without Mirjana, Sanel, Marko, Nebojša and Oliver! My gratitude has to go also to all my partners our line managers and teams leads who are always on frontier of our business, paving path to our solid and bright future!
Many thanks to all 250 of our colleagues for being with us and make enjoy.ing what it is!
Thank you all for amazing 5 years.
