Come together, be yourself
For our bass-playing, creative director Panca, to create an impact at Grab, you need collaboration, diverse perspectives, and a safe space to share your ideas.
Come together, be yourself
As creative director for Grab Indonesia, my role is to oversee all of the creative materials for Grab – especially for communication, activation and digital. For that, you need a lot of collaboration, but thankfully, the whole culture at Grab is really centred around that.
Coming from an agency and having a long career in the creative industry led me to develop somewhat of an ego. Not too big an ego, but an ego nonetheless. I learned quickly to leave that at the door once I entered Grab. Here, you learn to listen to people and the more you listen to people, the more creative you will be. And that transcends throughout our team and instead, we’ve created a group ego. We want to make our work the best and make it cool – but to do that we have to be comfortable, open and listen to each other.
Working here has switched my perspective completely – my work is no longer just about me, it’s about everyone. It's about the people that we serve, and building those relationships. Which is exactly what the product itself tries to do. Our creative process isn’t just about making a cool ad. It’s about asking questions. Is this working? Should we go deeper into activation? Does this project matter to people and will it better their lives?
Different perspectives are essential in this regard, and that’s why Grab is a safe space for sharing opinions. And we have such a vibrant mix of people from all backgrounds, cultures and countries, so individuality shines through but we come together as a collective. We always try to be humble, use our hearts, and remember that we’re all human. So when you bring together individuals as a collective culture, that’s when the magic happens. And it makes for pretty interesting brainstorming sessions within our team – we don’t just answer the brief, we put it through as many lenses as possible and that’s how we come up with something impactful.
But it’s not just all about work, we have a lot of fun too. A few of us are in a band together and I play the bass guitar. We actually played for the entire company recently, broadcasting live during a town hall. That was really exciting. I’ve seen Grabbers dance, read poetry, and act. So you can really see the scope for creativity across the whole company and people can come together to share that with each other in smaller groups too. Grab wants to support your professional and personal development so if you say “I want to start up an interest group for people to learn music” they’ll support you in that. For me, playing music is a chance to express myself and you never know how it impacts others. They might have wanted to learn music in college or just wanted to have a new skill, so it all comes back to that culture of learning and sharing. I think that’s why Grab is a place where you can be free to be yourself.