is a journalist and web editor at Philonomist. After working as a reporter for Ouest-France, she now collaborates with various publications.
Dear reader,
Does your company work in silos, and are you too broke to pay for a consultant to help boost the skills transfer between teams? The idea might strike you as odd, but hear me out: maybe you could take in one of those high school kids on a work experience program… We had one in our office not long ago, and seeing my colleagues explaining to him what they did all day made me realise I’ve never had the foggiest idea myself. In the five days he spent here, this teenager learned more about the functioning of my company than I have in several years!
When a high school student comes to watch and learn, they introduce an outside point of view on the company. This is a common method in literature: to adopt the perspective of a naive outsider in order to highlight unnoticed aspects of society. Now let’s imagine if all employees did this, i.e. spend half a day merely observing other services within their company. Would they not see the organisation and their colleagues’ work in a new light? Ultimately, everyone would know exactly who to turn to solve their problems and would be better able to respond to their colleagues’ needs. Not to mention the skills and tools they might bring back into their own service – such as a piece of organisational software or an AI-powered writing assistant…
These short work experience internships are especially relevant at a time when the spread of remote work is strengthening this siloization of businesses. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour, conducted among 60,000 American employees at Microsoft during the Covid crisis, shows that this is indeed happening: employees working remotely tend to communicate more with their closer colleagues, and not so much with the rest.
‘Every onboarding remains a top-down process in which recruits learn how things work, not why’
Of course, many companies pull out all the stops to ensure the successful onboarding of new recruits. And for good reason: the latter’s engagement, integration, and performances depend on it! Job shadowing can be part of onboarding. But this remains a top-down process in which recruits learn how things work, not why; nor is the process open to suggestions.
The kind of moments of internal observation which I propose, and which could be named “transversal shadowing”, would allow companies to question their practices internally. In literature, the perspective of the foreigner or outsider is often used to highlight the absurdities and flaws in society. Take Voltaire’s Candide (1759), for example, whose eponymous hero finds out the hard way that his master’s contention that “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” is far from true. His fellow Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu does the same thing in his Persian Letters (1721), in which a traveller from Persia discovers the many contradictions in 18th-century French society. He says of the prestigious Académie Française, for example, that it is made up of people who have no other purpose than to talk incessantly – something which would be considered profoundly odd in his native Persia.
And this is also what our high school intern did, without knowing it. Shielded by the legitimacy of his inexperience, he took the liberty to ask about our daily lives: why does so-and-so attend this meeting but not so-and-so? Why do you call that person on the phone when they’re only two rooms away? And that’s how we’ve ended up asking ourselves, even after the teenager is gone, why we work in this way rather than that…
Far from being a waste of time, this kind of questioning helps us identify areas of organisational rigidity and pointless processes. And is this not why we hire consultants, at a considerable cost? A colleague shadowing another should be well placed to notice inefficient processes and suggest areas of improvement. They’ll probably also be better placed than the consultant, in virtue of their own experience, to improve their colleague’s work methods. Don’t you think that the IT specialist of the company might be able to help you get more out of your everyday tools? Or that the accountant might be able to show you implications of your work which you hadn’t suspected?
“We must cultivate our garden,” Candide famously concludes, back on his farm after a series of adventures in which he travelled continents, narrowly survived war, execution, and even an earthquake; discovered the utopian land of Eldorado, where peace and abundance rule; all the while saving his lover Cunégonde from slavery… Like Candide’s farm, your company probably contains unsuspected resources in the form of employees whose skills, experience, and critical thinking are left to rot within the air-tight compartments of their respective silos. So before you search for solutions on the outside, why not start by cultivating your own garden?
Mariette Thom
Picture © Vale Zmeykov / Unsplash
