Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Building trust in workplace

Mar 20, 2004 13:50 pm / 2 comments

At my farewell party last night, I sat next to the mar­ket­ing man­ager. He is Scot­tish with a great sense of humour, and he has a gor­geous smile, but well known for his capac­ity to talk shop pas­sion­ately non-stop for hours on end. My last night with the com­pany, and here I am. If it is my fate, so be it.

But I didn’t want to spend the night in mis­ery, so I decided to pay atten­tion and take inter­est in his talk, mak­ing com­ments and ask­ing ques­tions. Sure enough, talk started out with the sub­ject of work, but through twists and turns, we were deep into dis­cus­sion about Japan and its his­tory of reli­gion onto cause and effect of reli­gion. I was quite sur­prised by his knowl­edge of religous his­tory in Japan, his pas­sion for learn­ing and his strong desire in liv­ing true to his beliefs. He rec­om­mended Hiro­hito and the Mak­ing of Mod­ern Day Japan and A Prob­lem from Hell for me to read.

After the din­ner, three peole whom I worked closely and I went to have cof­fee at a com­fort­able cafe nearby. They said sym­pa­thet­i­cally, boy, he was at it again, talk­ing shop, wasn’t he? They looked sur­prised when I told them that we had a good dis­cus­sion about cul­ture and religion.

We work with peo­ple who are directly related to what we are doing. Although every­thing each mem­ber of a com­pany does is related one way or other to every­body else, we are so busy try­ing to effec­tively per­form our job. It is off hours, the time like last night that we end up sit­ting next to some­one we are not entirely com­fort­able with for the din­ner that we learn some­thing new, some­thing impor­tant about other peo­ple within the com­pany. In a soci­ety like Japan where peo­ple work­ing for a large orga­ni­za­tion live far away from where they work, and the con­tent of work is so for­eign to their fam­ily, it becomes a prob­lem of allo­cat­ing time for either col­leagues or fam­ily. But as I expe­ri­enced last night, buidling trust in work­place occurs at non-business hours, be it work­ing over­time or hav­ing din­ner together.

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