For the past two years, I have been given the task of helping to bring the excitement of Fusion, D2L’s annual users conference, to the many employees at our office locations around the world unable to attend the conference in person. The Fusion conference leaves those employees who attend, all fired up from seeing the excitement from our customers and prospects. Thus, starting last year, D2L decided to bring that same feeling to all D2Lers.
Our internal conference, named FusionX, involves swag, food, watching the live Fusion keynote, games and prizes, as well as a social event. All employees across six of our offices are encouraged to participate in the different activities. For our corporate headquarters in Waterloo, our social involved taking over an event center in town to enjoy their patio, bowling, mini golf, food and other activities.
“Having gone to the real Fusion most years, I have always wished we could find a way to pass along the pride and energy you get from attending that event to every employee in the company. This year’s FusionX went a long way to accomplishing that same thing. I think going forward, the internal fight may just be over who gets to go to FusionX rather than Fusion…” – Brandon Nussey, CFO
One of this year’s highlights was the swag: D2L t-shirts. These aren’t just your ordinary, run of the mill t-shirts; they have “D2Ler since ___” with the year that each employee started on the back in 19 different colours aligning to our Service Blocks Program. Although Service time officially starts with full time employment, D2L was started by CEO John Baker on one of his co-op terms, and co-ops have truly had a huge impact throughout our 18 years to help build the company. We wanted to recognize co-op contributions by giving shirts that go back to everyone’s first day working at D2L, Day 1 of being a “D2Ler”. This also recognized our Boomerang D2Lers, employees who had left for a period of time to another company, but came back to us. We received many notes from employees letting us know how much they appreciated their co-op or previous time being recognized in this small, but meaningful, way, that the additional work to confirm these dates during this top secret project was absolutely worth it. One software developer said, “I left D2L in 2015 and came back this year, and I was delighted to find that my shirt was from my original start date in 2012. I’m finding I appreciate it more than I would have expected.”
Another highlight was using our Game-Based Learning Tool in place of a quiz this year. The game included 8 different activities including Matching, Sorting, Hotspots and Multiple Choice. The activities tested D2L history, previous Fusion facts, fun facts about the leadership team and more. Close to 100 employees participated and really enjoyed competing against one another to unlock activities, win achievements and climb the leaderboard.
It was a crazy few weeks leading up to it and insane two days during FusionX, but being given the autonomy and responsibility of taking this idea from vision to execution is something that I truly value. Being only 2 years out of school and 1.5 years into my HR career, it is opportunities like this that prove to me that I’m on the right path and a career in HR is where my interests and passions can be best used.
Huge thank you to the Senior Leadership Team for giving us the ability to run this event and to the many other people (including D2L’s awesome HR team) for making this event happen. So proud to be a part of the D2L team!
If you want to get a D2Ler since 2017 shirt, you can start by applying here.
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