What does it mean to build community within workplaces? How can care-ful collaboration and collectivity help us to negotiate workplace-related uncertainties?

Market logics ask us to think of working with others as a form of collaboration, or teamwork. Teams are expected to be both agile and productive; that’s how to bolster an organization’s bottom line. Consider the consequences of a workplace that prioritizes worker agility and productivity in service of profitability. Now consider a rhetorical response to such market-based values. How might you do more than just collaborate, but also create a care-ful sense of collective action by being sensitive to one another’s lives outside of work?

Genres You’ll Practice

• memos
• charter documents
• strategic plans

Contemporary Conversations

In the following examples, consider and critique each organization’s practices and expectations concerning collaboration.

1. “As flu rages, food workers resist calling in sick” [source: Village Voice]
2. “Simply put, our modern workplaces are feeding a sense of inadequacy in the face of a track record of achievement and success.” [source: Quartz]
3. Ohio State University’s strategic plan
4. “What leaders need is a roadmap that governs and guides how their people and teams “show up”; how they behave and interact. The best way that I know how to do this is with a team charter.” [source: Forbes]

Professional Writer Spotlight

Below are quotes from our interviews with Alex and Frank, each of whom writes professionally in for-profit organizations. We don’t necessarily endorse each of their opinions, but we think it’s worthwhile for you to know how actual professional writers think about performing collaboration. Their perspectives come from having worked as professional writers in the world for at least the last 12 months or more.

Alex, on project management:

“We don’t use MS Project. I don’t know why. We use an Excel spreadsheet to make Gantt charts. Again, I don’t know why. Usually with our contractors or sometimes the owners will do this, I’m guessing, OSU probably has this type of online software their construction process gets managed in. A lot of times larger organizations that bill a lot will do this. I’ll explain it in a second. If they don’t, usually large contractors will also have an online interface to manage the construction process.

The point of that is because there are often questions that come up during the construction process that need to be monitored. Those things have a 48-hour turnaround where we need to provide the answers to the contractor. Sometimes it’s a change to the design or to change a product or whatever. All those things need to be communicated and there needs to be a paper trail for it. That’s why it’s good to have an online system so it’s not sitting on someone else’s server. It’s accessible to the owner, the contractor, the architect, whoever else needs to be in on it. That’s how the contractor basically submits information to the architect for approval or to get paid or anything.”

Frank, on work/life balance:

“I think that there’s always an ongoing challenge in finding ways to create an environment that is relevant to the culture of the people who work there, on the one hand. But can still generate the kind of product or deliverable that it has to for its market on the other. And what I mean by that is, people are very concerned, I think, in all organizations about the culture that they’ve developed for the people who work there.

There are different views about how much flexibility people should have in the workplace, what constitutes … How much work do you have to do to maintain the business on the one hand, but how does that square with balance of life issues on the other? How are you going to try to accommodate different views, and different people and do it in a way that is gonna maintain a viable organization? Because, at least in the professional service world, so much of what we do is driven by client problems, and those come up at irregular times.

So people who want more certainty in their workday are not gonna be as happy working at a law firm, or an accounting firm where client emergencies are things that really develop client relationships, and that’s where the work comes from.”

More from Frank, on life outside of work:

“It’s hard to plan things like vacations, and sometimes it’s really tough. I recently was involved in some injunctive hearings in federal court, and I had cut a vacation short to come home for my mother, who as it turned out was in her last couple of days. And I’m sitting here on the phone with a court, sitting with my mom. And you have to, at some point you turn the phone off, because you’ve got bigger things to do. Every one of these issues was an absolute emergency, and no one, you couldn’t say no to anybody.

Sometimes it’s entertaining and fun, sometimes it’s not…It’s the velocity of life. That’s a real challenge. Because some enterprises just operate at a much higher velocity. You’ve gotta find people who are willing to do that.”

Tactical Questions

1. How can your team modify the charter document and/or strategic plan genre so that it builds an authentic sense of collaboration, particularly by being attentive to each team member’s complex life both inside and outside of this class?
2. Start from the expectation that each of you will have at least one day when you won’t be fully “present” (either physically or psychologically). Discuss the consequences on your team when that (inevitably) happens. What might it look like to enact a semester-long plan that takes such experiences into account?
3. What barriers, institutions, and/or structures might make it difficult for you to be fully “present” as a team member this semester?