Inside InterNations
In the series “Success Stories”, InterNations team members celebrate major highlights to make them proud.
In this first installment, guest author Cherice, a South African expat and a Content & Communications Manager in our Business Solutions Team, looks back at all the hard work that led to their recent nomination for an important industry award. Congratulations!
The company behind InterNations, the world’s biggest global expat community, is sometimes mistaken for a US American business or even for a multinational corporation with a branch office in every country. While the latter might be an aspirational goal to strive for, we’re not quite there yet.
On our website and our app, we do feature 420 online communities around the world. In most of these cities, we also offer our members the opportunity to meet in person, thanks to our InterNations Ambassadors and Consuls. As the face of InterNations on a local level, these particular members dedicate their time on a voluntary basis, organizing official events and activities to bring expats and global minds from Abu Dhabi to Zurich together.
In fact, InterNations — the company, not the community — was originally “made in Germany”, and most employees are still based there. However, we now have offices in four European cities. Find out more about the InterNations locations here!
We’ve asked Lars, our CTO, a few questions about how he remembers the first hackathon we ever hosted. Let’s see if there’ll be another one soon!
Last Thursday, our team members Theresa (Head of Business Solutions) and Christa (Team Lead Human Resources) started their working day in a most unusual manner: Together with the Monteverdi Choir Hamburg and 1,500 other people, they performed Beethoven’s famous “Ode to Joy” in the “Elphi”, Hamburg’s spectacular new concert hall.
International Women’s Day, on 8 March, is an occasion to celebrate women’s achievements, but also to look at areas where there’s still room for improvement.
In Germany, the percentage of women in management (i.e. members of management boards and managing directors) is being widely discussed: the current share of 29% is somewhat below the EU average (34%).
Frankly, InterNations doesn’t do any better than the average German company, though we don’t perform any worse, either. If we count our two founders and co-CEOS as regular members of our management board, three of ten board members are women. At 30%, this corresponds more or less to the national average.
The women on our management board are anything but average, though, and they have a lot to share about leadership in general, as well as women and leadership in particular.
