Everybody has reasons for showing up to work everyday besides the nice piece of paper you receive every other week with a bunch of numbers on it, otherwise known as a paycheck. I recently spoke with my fellow Software Support team members and, together, we came up with a list of our Top Ten reasons why we keep coming back:

1. We actually enjoy the people that we work with! We don’t just sit here and stare at our computer screens waiting for a phone call or email to come in; we interact with our coworkers to make our work environment enjoyable. Of course, we have to balance our interactions well, in order to make sure we get all of our work done in a timely manner and that all our clients are happy but we have a good time at work. That’s really important.
2. If we don’t know the answer to a question, we can ask anybody that we feel might, even if that person is the CEO or President of the company. Having access to people at all levels of the company not only makes us feel like we’re part of a real team, it also means we’re always learning and growing.
3. We love receiving phone calls from our clients, who are a joy to talk to and who always brighten our day.
4. We actually enjoy digging into reported issues, figuring out why they occurred so that they can be prevented in the future. Knowing that the work we do helps make a better product for our clients is incredibly rewarding, in and of itself!
5. That one Friday a month where we have a F.E.A.S.T. of food.
6. We love helping to develop the new features that will make the lives of our clients easier and enable them to work more efficiently.
7. And, we get a sneak peak at all those new features once they’re ready to be rolled out to clients! Part of our job is to test those new features, making sure they work as designed and that they don’t have adverse effects on existing items in current applications.
8. We love the feeling we get when we’ve helped a client who called in with a support issue and she hangs up happy, because we were able to solve the issue and send her on her way. Even when the solution isn’t an immediate one, knowing that we have a team of support reps and developers looking into the issue helps us feel confident that we’ll be able to follow up with more information and the client will be happy very soon!
9. We enjoy contributing to the Knowledge Base Articles we use when we come across questions or issues that we haven’t dealt with before. Chances are, somebody on our team has walked through the problem before and the Knowledge Base provides us another option to get to the root of the issue and help our clients solve it.
10. The candy machine that sits on my desk. It’s just what it sounds like-people stop by my desk throughout the day feeding their pennies (or other change) into the machine and getting back a few pieces of candy to make them smile. I think candy machines make everybody feel like a little kid who just hit the jackpot.

What are the greatest perks about your job or the company you work for?