“You all lived, worked, and socialized together? How did living communally affect the work, and how can you apply what you learned in workplaces where people don’t live together?”

I’m glad you asked. 

Given that quarters were close, with shared dorms and even communal showers in some cases, the amount and type of conflict were far less than expected. Sometimes it was absurd because we are humans, and sometimes it was dramatic for the same reason. However, the operation of our collective as a community gave us a very close view of everything we did, from why we were there to who was there with us. Being humanized and up close made it easier to care about the person next to you, and that care translated into the way work was done. It was far from perfect, but prolonged close proximity to anyone is bound to condense resentment and illuminate problems. We had less conflict than what I have experienced in most other workplaces, and I feel as if the community aspect of it made the work aspect of it healthier, and vice versa.

One of the most profound lessons I learned was the importance of the collective agreement on what constitutes “a good day.” Our group ran the tourist-facing services at a national park. The tourists were there to see wildlife and scenery.  Simply put, “a good day” was any day someone saw a bear, a moose, or the mountain. Unique to this environment was the fact that the fruit of our labor was evident every day. The guest-facing and park-facing teams returned to the campus every evening, and they brought stories from “out there” in the park to the infrastructure staff who kept the campus humming. 

Living on a campus meant that at the end of every day, we ate dinner and socialized at the bar with the same folks who were doing all the work. So, all the work we did touched us all, every day. We all knew where we fit in the flow, and we all talked about the pains and gains of our day together.

As leaders, it’s imperative to identify our own culture’s equivalents to moose, bear, and mountains – the things that matter – and to create opportunities that allow them to be shared frequently.

My question for the leadership team focused on building strong employee relations strategies: What are the small bits of evidence of a “good day” that *any* employee can collect during the performance of their job and bring back to the proverbial well? Are you providing a well to which they can return? Does every single employee have the opportunity to see the impact of their labor on a regular basis?

This is not a call to return to the office for closeness. I learned this in close proximity, but I also learned that proximity could very well be part of the problem. More importantly, workplaces have employees in different or multiple locations for a variety of reasons, and these solutions must work for everyone. 

This is a call to define your organization’s most critical values and to become deliberate in the way you talk collectively about the evidence that you do business by those values.