Work: The Musical

The Morning Sing-A-Long

You know the lyrics to some songs, right? Maybe hundreds of songs. In fact, the weekend social scene shows us that many can be intoxicated near the point of unconsciousness and still recite the lyrics to a few songs at will. You and your friends could probably sing along to songs that define your common experiences. We’ve seen subcultures grow up around genres and subgenres of music. You ever seen The Cure fans who look like Robert Smith?

So, the other day I was riding the bus to work and it occurred to me how many people – like millions – listen to songs on their way to work. Also, that those people listen to these songs all the time. That they know these songs by heart. And so, they’re going in to this job every day, too. I wonder what parts of their job they could recite at will like they could those song lyrics?

You see, the success of our work depends on how well we understand what we’re doing in a start-to-finish sort of way, and how our effort contributes to that. When I look around at my colleagues at work, I realize that across the 140 or so of us in this department*, there’s not a lot of overlap in our work. We are, as they say, siloed. Yet, there is a lot in common across our experiences at work – the pressures, the climate, the politics, the personalities, the meetings, the process.

The other day on the bus, I realized they listen to that music for a qualitative sensory experience – that is, it makes them feel better to listen to it. As they listen to it, they learn it. They learn it so well, they can sing along with it while it’s on the radio and they’re working on an intense task. Wow. That means those lyrics are engrained in their heads. 

For most people commuting, they have that music driven into their minds through headphones. It’s the only thing they can hear. Usually for hours a week. Think of that Nielsen-like survey (NNR, not NNg) where they ask ‘how many hours of tv do you watch in a week?’ Well, you spend more time at work that with your family. But, what of that dogma do you memorize?

The Soundtrack of a Job

If there were a soundtrack to our jobs, what would it be? That is, if we picked real songs by real musicians, what would would we pick. Now, a separate challenge: If you scored our jobs and made our work a musical, who could sing along well at the first rehearsal? Would it be a tragedy? A comedy? Modern or Baroque? Kabuki? Make sense?

I go to to work with the express goal of making the lives of the people I work with better. I want them to be happier when they go home from work as a result of working with me. I want to make their jobs better – our jobs better – by improving the environment we work in. Of course, that means having my colleagues understand why they’re at work and what would make them individually successful and us collectively successful. 

I want to set it to music. No, not make work a musical. But, I want our work, our common goals, to be so compelling that they know it by heart. I think you call that a compelling vision.

Melodic Dogma

I believe we are all part of a corporate culture – a subculture that’s not visible to most people. Some companies or workgroups have layers of subcultures. 

Cultures have rituals that define them. What rituals would you make to define your corporate culture? Which ones do you already go through? I think the most common ritual I’ve been a part of is a process for a project lifecycle. But, there are finer melodies and rituals that pervade our corporate cultural expeirence: team meetings, regular reports we generate or consume, seasonal programs, internal relationships, external relationships. 

I have another goal: To document and describe the facets of corporate culture, because I think understanding helps us fit into it and to fit it to us.

In a previous post about cultural software, I argued that my field of practice is a software installed into this culture. I pursue the goal of documenting understanding corporate culture because I also believe it will help us improve our situations. You might say that we have to build plug-ins, extensions, and add-ons for work. Of course, we have to improve the hardware, operating system, and runtime environment too.

*This was first drafted when I was at Target on the Interactive Marketing Platform UX Team.