The book states: "Organizations are are host to a variety of persons with different understandings of the good; organizational communication ethics recognizes the need for a minimal common understanding of a given good in each organizational setting, requiring one to take responsibility for the setting, requiring one to take responsibility for the dwelling that the communicative practices seek to construct." (page 138)
The best example that I can think of is the company that I work for, Whole Foods. We have a very diverse set of "team members" as they call us. There are many different backgrounds, talents, life experiences and levels of education- from one co-worker who is fluent in four languages (!), people who are still in high school or went to Whole Foods right after graduating and moved up the corporate ladder, people who grew up poor, with many advantages, many different ethnicities and talents. We are all also relatively open about our talents, too, for the betterment of the team. If we have a customer who doesn't speak English, odds are they speak one of the other three languages my aforementioned co-worker speaks. If someone needs to know about baking substitutions, they come to me.
By doing this, we create a dwelling space rich with ideas and resources- it really is amazing how seldom we have to Google something for a customer, and how we immediately know what co-worker to send a customer to for a specific question. By communicating our skills and knowledge sets with each other, we create a rich dwelling place of ideas and resources that are beneficial to us and to customers. It could also be considered an informal type of organizational communication- store and company leadership understands that by encouraging chatting with each other during downtime and by letting us get to know each other as people and not just as Whole Foods employees, we are contributing to the good of team morale and customer satisfaction. Within our specific organization, the culture of informal organizational communication is paramount. It is our store's version of, as the book states on page 148, "a community of memory."
Additionally, by referring to us as "team members" rather than as employees, it creates a sort of energy that we ought work together because we're all in it together. And that, along with allowing us the opportunity to communicate outside the realm of the job, creates a sense of purpose and community that I have seldom experienced in any other of the many companies I have worked for.
Furthermore, Whole Foods has a set of core values that protect the good of the company on a formal level. One of those core values is "satisfying, delighting and nourishing our customers." By us all knowing and practicing this formal good, it encourages team work all over again. Those core values also serve to hold each other accountable, and make things like team member evaluations more straightforward. Also, because of this, we remember to work together using our unique talents (some of which have been mentioned) to take personal and collective responsibility for customer satisfaction and team member unity.
When has working with an organization that had a strong community of memory been helpful to you? How can individuals within an organization work together to create accountability and a comfortable dwelling space?
Hi Andrea!
ReplyDeleteI really like your example of organizational communication and working at Whole Foods. In response to your question, I would say that working in an organization with a strong community of memory has been helpful to me when the holidays roll around and work is really busy. I work at a grocery store as well, and sometimes it just isn't enjoyable going to work knowing that you are going to be running around crazy busy all day while cranky people buy food for a holiday that you are going to end up working anyways. By having a community of co-workers who share enough experiences together that we have created a set of memories that form a cohesive identify about ourselves as a team of friends working together, it is much, much easier to get through the work day with a smile on my face. We achieve this community by recognizing each other when we come in and leave, and by having conversations with each other throughout the day that both do and do not have something to do with work. Just like you said, I think that this "small talk" really is beneficial to the good of our organizational communication.