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Corporate culture. Training
Training as part of work
I accept working in an office as an intrinsic part of life. The more time it takes during the course of a day, month, year, then the more use should be drawn from this process. In the other case this is an empty waste of time.
In my first post dedicated to corporate culture I mention the necessity for comfortable personal space to become oneself. Today I want to write about training, i.e. to go further and expand my principle and understanding of the working process as it is for me and others who set themselves the aim of a conscious approach to one’s activities in life.
According to the principle of development, people gain experience from any activity and each of us can make this process more active and dynamic if there is an aim – to seek something new.
I have often noticed the peculiarity in myself that if I don’t apply effort in the completion of some task or other I often get bored of it and want to switch over to something “more interesting.” In a certain sense this trick is my own laziness and unwillingness to develop what had already been begun. It can be explained very simply: until that point when I reached my imaginary ‘ceiling’ – my knowledge, capabilities and skills were adequate for the job – everything was going swimmingly. But at the moment I hit ‘the wall’ I needed to initiate something. In this case the way to make a step forward would be to do something (every task has its own precise step at this moment) that would lead me to a new level of understanding and open new possibilities.
It is amusing that this principle of development is reflected most widely in computer games, but most people prefer to keep on playing.
In this way I can glance through the ‘wall’ and surmount it. If you don’t do this, then it is pointless completing the job and activity will naturally grind to a halt. The sense of this same aim to seek for something new in whatever you are engaged in comes down to searching inside, within the borders of your current activity, and even afterwards, if the quest has dried up, to start looking from the outside selecting a new or accompanying direction.
In my work under a pseudonym I apply the word training as the most understood and illustrative description of the search process. If you need to climb over ‘the wall’ and learn, if you choose that activity or direction, where you really don’t want to go but you know deep down inside yourself that it’s useful. This state of mind is a true sign of which point you need to apply your effort.
I use a similar principle when working with colleagues – some of them often get those tasks which enable them to spend their working time usefully, some should test to their heart’s content the fullness of their current activity in order to understand where they want to go next, while some can simply carry out a clearly defined set of tasks well – these are all important stages of individual training for each of them.
Corporate culture. Personal space
Personal space
Over the years I’ve visited the offices of dozens of clients, suppliers and competitors. It should be said that in ten years little has changed – people work as before in a right-angled space of straight lines and corners with a window to the middle. The back of the chair could also be part of these fixed contours, as well as the bends in the toilet bowl and the sink in the washroom... With the appearance of A-Class and higher business centres there is more light in these boxes and something resembling space, although I find it hard to imagine spending a happy 8-9 hours of one’s life a day in this enclosed space.
I have the impression that this a miraculous relic from some sort of terrible past which should after all suddenly pass away.
If you get tired at your place of work then it means it’s just not for you, and it makes sense to look for something new. No, I don’t necessarily mean another place of work, but somewhere you’ll be comfortable. I am convinced that the understanding of ‘comfort’ only appeared because people began to confine themselves for space. For example when I manage to work for a long time outside the office I don’t remember this as an issue. What’s even more important is that comfort should be reached beforehand inside a person, this is the inherent acquisition of interest, motivation and efficiency. Everyone has enormous latent potential, which they can’t even guess at, but can be extracted simply by creating a comfortable place to work. I really admire the attitude of some company leaders (who can be counted on one hand) who create ‘chill-out’ areas, play-rooms and work-zones in their offices and organise office space in such a way that employees can find a place where it’s pleasant to spend more than an hour at a time working on any project.
Why does this matter?
The world around us is a dynamic, changing structure that is evolving all the time. There are lots of simple and smooth things in nature. In order to develop a person needs dynamism, a change of scene, good impressions, which are expressed in the simplest of things beginning with what’s around them. Try and lock yourself in for a day in an empty square two by two metres room sitting on your office chair, and then try and do the same in the open air where you can sit, lie down, play football for an hour or go on a bike ride – you’ll notice the difference. The efficiency of your work and number of tasks completed will be different. I described two extremes. It’s completely unnecessary to drive people outside for them to work better. It’s enough to create a simple and comfortable work area where they can work, communicate and move. This is far more inspiring than any motivation and developmental training held in stuffy, square meeting rooms.
