Workplace
There is no going back to the way things were, and even if you could, would you want to? Ideas on how to make our new situation even better.
Have you ever been to Trader Joe’s? (You have to live in America, I think) The food and snacks, both frozen and fresh, are excellent. But the best thing about Trader Joe’s for me is the staff. No matter which store you go to, from Oakland to NYC, everyone who works there has a confident cheery can-do attitude and kindness that goes beyond the usual ‘have a nice day.’
I was intrigued by this, and I asked one of the store managers, ‘How do they hire such friendly people?’ His answer was revealing.
He told me that their hiring system was not unique. It was the culture of the place that was different. The culture would affect anyone who joined Trader Joe’s. That can do, always there to help attitude, he said, was infectious. The pay and benefits helped, and soon the opportunity to be unionized, but the main thing is the culture. If everyone around you is behaving helpfully, then you eventually adopt their way of thinking.
As we all figure out how to work before and after COVID, culture, it seems, is one of the hardest things to measure but has the most significant impact on how people feel about work. To that end, I wrote the following two articles on how to start building some of that hard-to-bottle work culture into your everyday work lives.
“Work culture” looks at ways to focus your time, create a more balanced work culture and find the suitable space and environments for the best work.
For many people, remote work is the new norm. “Thrive in your virtual workplace” looks at this new type of workplace as an ecosystem and provides a guide on how to make this new virtual workspace work for you and your teams.
There is no going back to the way things were, and even if you could, would you want to? In some cases, people have found new ways of working which let them balance their lives. I hope in these two articles you find some valuable ideas to make this unique situation better.
