The Perils of a Summer Job - The Colleagues and the Work Culture

I have updated you guys a lot about my training and my work and the various lessons that I have learnt during the course of my summers. But an important thing to remember as an MBA student is that you can learn as much if not more from your colleagues and the rich work culture of the organization that you are working in as you can learn from the training.

So I started looking around my office for inspiration - inspiration from colleagues, inspiration from the way they work, inspiration from the general work culture that prevailed in the organization so that I could maximize my learning’s from my summer internship and believe me that there was no shortage of inspirations when it come to my organization.

The first thing I noticed was the gusto and the enthusiasm that the employees had in my organization. I had learnt in my MBA that it is very important for the employees of an organization to have a lot of enthusiasm for any organization to be successful. Looking at my colleagues in office I knew why my organization was so successful. All employees displayed great camaraderie and used to gather around each others table to gossip the whole day long without any guilt or remorse. I thought to myself that this must be helping them refresh from a hard night's sleep and help them to perform better at whatever minimal tasks that they used to do in office.

The fifth lesson is: No matter whether you have any work or no in office, but it is always necessary to relax and enjoy with your colleagues to build good team spirit!

Another important aspect that I learnt from the organizational culture was the need for great team spirit. My organization was the epitome of team spirit so much so that all it required was a single person to doze off or leave work and all the fellow employees would leave their work and join him in doing whatever unproductive work that the first guy started doing.

The sixth lesson is: All your colleagues will always join you in doing an unproductive task but the same rule never holds true for a productive task.

Also one very important thing to learn is the art of spending time in office when there is no work. Though this sounds very easy believe me it is one of the most difficult thing that a summer intern faces in the course of his internship. There a lot of ways in which you can overcome the boredom associated with being idle in office without work for long periods of time. Believe me the employees in my organization are like samurais when it comes to battling boredom. They have devised ingenious ways to overcome it. Like sitting in front of the computers for hours and staring at the screensaver. This technique requires you to change the screensaver from time to time else the technique itself can also become boring or to have a contest to see who can drink maximum number of coffees during the course of the day!

Another important way to battle boredom is through the age old technique of sleeping. To further illustrate how employees are tackling boredom I took a few photographs of my colleagues to graphically illustrate the techniques involved in sleeping for long hours.

The specimen above illustrated the classical "I will catch a fly in my mouth" sleeping technique. It takes immense guts and concentration to lie in this same position without moving to attract and trap a fly as you have to be absolutely still for long periods of time!

The two specimens above show how you can rest your head while sleeping. It is of extreme significance that you rest your head while sleeping for long hours to avoid any sprain in the neck or your back. See how specimen 1 uses a side support and specimen 2 uses the back rest to give support to their vertebrae and avoid any injuries or aches.

The specimen above shows the importance of neck excercises during long hours of sleep. See how he moves his neck in a anti-clockwise direction to stimulate blood circulation. Otherwise long hours of inactivity can cause slow blood circulation and hence it may affect your productivity at work (though the very reason for sleeping for so long is that you dont have any work!)

The specimen seen above lastly shows the importance of doing a few streching excercises during long hours of inactivity. This again helps blood circulation and also helps you loosen up so that you become nimble and can sleep comfortably!

So you see that there are learnings all around you when you are at work you just need to look in the right places!

Observing the above behavior of the employees of my organisation I came up with a tag-line for my firm XYZ Online. It goes: "XYZ Online, Employees Offline!"