When Workplace Becomes a Second Family
By Jayjay Viray
During the week, the office becomes your immediate community, the residents become your little barangay. Within that organization, there are many characters, and different roles are played out. Once you leave the office or workplace, you are thrust into a whole other world that will most likely have NOTHING to do with it.
Most often that not, your workplace becomes your family, the home away from home. Just like any family, this can work for or against you, depending on how you play your cards.
The game theory
Mr. John, the mathematician and Nobel-Prize-winning economist that the movie “A Beautiful Mind” was loosely based on, came up with the Game Theory, which is focused on and which later on won him the Nobel Prize for Economics. This theory expands Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory. Essentially, it states that it is “a branch of applied mathematics and economics that studies situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns. The essential feature, however, is that it provides a formal modelling approach to social situations in which decision-makers interact with other minds.” (www.wikipedia.org)
This means that one should use everything at their disposal to get the best result. It means that everyone in a group will work to get the best result for themselves as well as for the group.
This can be applied to the office where interaction is either considered scandalous (e.g. romances) or just simply being unnecessarily obsequious. Though sometimes there are those kinds of relationships, there is also a lot of room for ones that create a healthy partnership and camaraderie.
Walking into spider webs
The webs that we weave in our workplaces are almost always an advantage to professional growth. Know the people in the other departments. Try to join inter-departmental activities. Having friends in every unit usually helps you get your work done faster and easier.
It is easy to become a bit scared or nervous if you’re new for example, but it is a perfect opportunity to expand your intra-office network. You can even use your being new to be introduced to everyone in the company, if you have not done the ‘tour’ of the office already. This being a ‘newbie’ is usually a good way to meet your new colleagues and find out certain policies and rules of the offices.
All For One, and One For All
The best thing out of this small networking strategy is that you can become an efficient and reliable employee. You and your colleagues fulfill the Game Theory, by bringing about the optimum results by a synergized and mutual synchronization of different areas, by going towards the same direction. Then you all work forward to boost the company, which is perhaps the most basic and essential part of teamwork.
Much like a military operation, knowing the person beside, in front and behind you may just prove to be the one thing that will expedite those pesky deliverables, help you with that presentation, get you through that meeting or even get you the first dibs on the coffee in the morning.
Just be sure that when it is someone else’s turn to network, use the golden rule as a guide: help them as much as you want them to help you.
[Jayjay Viray is the Country Manager of JobsDB Phils, Inc. For questions about this and more, please email Jayjay Viray at jayjay.v@jobsdb.com.ph.] |
