“Webbing makes me want to do my best”
Yarden Levi, Accounting and Collection Specialist at Webbing, shares how her 12-years experience at the company resulted in speaking a different language, becoming more confident and friendly, and even getting a degree in psychology.
I grew up in a very musical Israeli family, so when I was a kid, I wanted to be a singer. I still love singing, but now I’m mostly focusing on other hobbies. For almost ten years now I’ve been dancing flamenco, and I enjoy it very much. It’s a very musical thing, too, with all the different styles and castanets. I like to travel in Israel and abroad. I love hiking and traveling in the South of Israel in the desert. I also enjoy reading books. I read a lot, all kinds of books: romantic ones, books on economics to educate myself, on self-improvement, history books, I just love reading.
Three years ago, I got a degree in psychology from the Open University of Israel. It was difficult to study while having a full-time job, but eventually, it happened, and it’s one of my great accomplishments. Webbing played a major role in it from day one: it was one of my colleagues here who gave me the push to start, and encouraged me to study every day.
How I found Webbing
After I graduated high school and did my army stint, I got my first job – for four years I worked in customer service for an Israeli internet services provider. Then the company was restructured. At the time, I was no longer answering customers’ calls, but rather working behind the scenes, in a department that reviewed the calls to improve our service. The company decided to stop investing in that department and the whole department was laid off.
I began searching for another job and had a call with someone who was extremely nice and explained that they were a new company looking for someone to work in the operations team. I went for an interview with Noam and then with Yaniv, Webbing’s founders, and ever since I’ve been here. It’s already been 12 years and I’m fourth on the list of the longest-tenured Webbing employees, including the founders.
How I stayed at Webbing
From the beginning, what stood out was the people, they made me fall in love with Webbing. There were about 20 employees back then, I had a very warm welcome, and the interview with the founders was great. They presented Webbing as a young company, and there was this certain vibe here, I felt like it was a great place to work at.
It was very different from my previous job – there we had 3000 employees, a big company, a lot of people. And here it was a small company, you knew everyone. When I got to the operations team, there were 4 or 5 girls, they were all about my age and very nice, too. We got together, we became friends, it was fun coming here – and it still feels great coming here after all these years.
The work at operations was very intense. Back then, we worked with private customers not big companies, and we had to deliver a lot of orders on the same day, so there was a lot of time pressure. Now it’s more relaxed. Yet even with the pressure we had back then – it was not like my previous workplace, it was far less stressful, and I’d rather have that any day.
My journey at Webbing
After being in the operations team for a few years, I moved to the customer service side. Later, I joined the collection department and started to manage the billing cycle, the invoices and everything that is related to that.
Many things have changed in these years at Webbing, of course – because people change, and the company got bigger and bigger. Our products and services have changed dramatically.
When I started here, the whole company spoke Hebrew – both to the employees and the customers. After a few years, we started providing services in English. I remember thinking to myself “What am I supposed to do now? I speak English, but not in my day-to-day work. I have never written an email in English!”. Now 90% of my daily work is in English and I enjoy it.
When I came to Webbing, I wasn’t very self-confident. I didn’t know the company, and at first, I felt very insecure. Now, I can say I learned to adjust to different people, and I think I’m more confident overall. Also, I’m more friendly than I was. The people here are amazing, and you get to know a lot of different people from different places, with different backgrounds. It’s great to work in a multicultural environment like that.
Why I love working at Webbing
It’s fun to work here, that’s a fact. There are two sides to it: first, it’s the people – it does feel like family, I enjoy coming here in the morning. The other side, the professional one, is that you know that every day is going to be different and filled with new challenges.
It also feels nice when someone is thinking about you and trying to improve the work environment. With all the activities that our HR is doing, I feel like they really try to consider our well-being both within and outside the company. For instance, now that they have opened the gym and we’re going there together with I’m having a lot of fun.
But it’s not just that. There’s also something about the founders, Noam and Yaniv. They are very modest people, very down to earth, their door is always open, you can talk to them if you have any problem, and that makes you feel more relaxed, more secure. And I guess that it makes people work better and want to do their job the best they can. At least from my perspective, it makes me want to do my best. And maybe that’s the biggest difference between Webbing and other companies.