Magical Thinking about Where You Work
This week's pod deconstructs the notion that a company culture can be healthy in an unhealthy geographical place. Instead, we propose caring for your company's people by caring for your neighborhood.
Let’s start with a quick but terrifying inventory of the contents of the average company fridge:
A Ziploc bag with a quarter of a bologna sandwich.
Tupperware containers traceable to the Jurassic Era.
Thirty-four packages of catsup.
A Panda Express plastic bag, empty except for three plastic forks.
A lunch sack of Shishito peppers from someone’s garden.
Half a melted Frosty.
What in the world could change the Cocaine Bear Status of your break room fridge? Throwing everything out? Scrubbing the shelves with acid? That won’t help. The shelves will fill up in a week or two. No, you’ll have to address people’s choices about where they go for lunch, how much they eat, how they package leftovers—and why a stack of Wendy’s napkins does not actually require refrigeration.
This little parable has a widespread application: what’s happening within is nearly always related to what’s happening beyond.
This week on the Mode/Switch Pod, special guest Debra Rienstra, a climate writer and activist, talks about what’s happening within and beyond your company. It’s a conversation, in other words, about businesses and their neighborhoods.
For us Mode/Switchers—David, LaShone, Emily, Craig, and Haley—the biggest surprise was this insight:
If you want to care for your company’s culture, you gotta care for your company’s place.
If you’re a new subscriber to the Mode/Switch, we’re excited to have you along for the ride! Here’s how this works: every Tuesday, you get a newsletter (edited by Craig) making sense of American work culture. And then on Fridays, you’ll find a podcast (featuring org researchers and career professionals) that puts work culture problems into intergenerational conversation. That’s the plan, anyway. Summertime podcast production schedules tend to be more relaxed.