There are some BIG take-aways that I am admittedly already primed to appreciate in this story: The premise of questioning the usual corporate/institutional mentality and methodology; the freedom to experiment; the failing fast and learning from those mistakes; the visual representations of work done and to be completed; and the learning learning learning more approach to employee development are all highly aligned with my own thoughts. It is inspiring to learn about a company that has found ways to make these the norm, but none of these conflict with any of my mental models of what can/should work in business and in education.
- Let's question seat time, lectures, grades, multiple choice assessments as the only models for learning. (many are and you inspire me!)
- Let's encourage error making and allow students to fail without damaging repercussions on their future goals.
- Let's provide an easy to understand visual indicator of a students achievements, skills and competencies.
- Let's continue to provide inspiring challenges for learners to accomplish something meaningful.
And there were other elements of the story that DID challenge my concepts of a truly joyful workplace (for me): Paired work is a huge one (Sharing one computer! Yikes! I'm a total mouse hog); open floor plans -- won't the noise bother me?; Funny hat-wearing public team-share round robin reporting -- I appreciate the need for a relaxed environment, but the description here seems awkward/embarrassing, no?
Sheridan is careful to tell us that not all of these specific habits are necessary components of a joyful workplace. But the sharing of the joy is important...
A joyful culture produces stories the world is yearning to hear. Capturing those stories and retelling them often reinforces your culture, as the outside world will want to come peek inside, ask probing questions, and walk away inspired to pursue their own joyful journey.
A joyful culture draws in people from outside the company, including clients, the local community, and the press.
Sharing naturally happens more (more easily) in open environment where people work together. My concerns with paired work were somewhat tempered here...
...when asked, the majority of our team self-identify as introverts. This makes sense to me for several reasons: Introversion supports the deep thinking needed to solve complex problems. Introverts prefer fewer, deeper relationships. Introverts are often better, active listeners.
If everyone is tired and stressed, and also allowed to close his or her door or block out the world with earbuds, the chances of overhearing others' ideas just won't occur.
This doesn't address the noise issue, but it does cause me to reflect on the paired activities and paired practice classes I designed for my Chinese class last year. Each pair would decide on what they needed to practice most and then work on it together -- they could read passages, practice vocab, challenge each other with questions they would be asked to respond to later during interviews -- the idea was to keep producing verbally, so it shouldn't have been a quiet environment. It worked some days, but other days, when lack of preparedness, stress, fatigue got them down, they reverted back to their old comfortable isolated quiet individual ways.
If change is to stick, you must quickly replace the old rewards with new rewards of equal or greater value (and remember, most treasured rewards are not monetary). Failure to establish new rewards will cause the team to revert to old forms and old rewards the first chance they get.Not sure I adequately provided new rewards.
Other positive elements of paired working include faster and easier hiring of new employees, scalability, and simply sharing the load. I know from the MOOC we offer to new online instructors, the team (pair) teaching that happens there, improves the course greatly (thanks Emily) (and quite frankly, I couldn't do it by myself, nor would I want to). I had a few team taught courses in college, and they were always really interesting as the instructors would invariably get into a discussion that would extend beyond the course and often demonstrated how intelligent, knowledgable people could engage in intellectual disagreement. At the very least/most, different points of view were presented, and we all need to witness different viewpoints more often.
Lots more to think about. However, in the interest of getting this post done (another part of a joyful workplace), I'll stop here. Read it, and talk about it.
(Thanks Nicole for recommending this title!)
