(Organizational) Culture II

In a conversation with an actual FDA employee this week, she said something to me that I found very sobering and extremely sad. When talking to her to see how she felt about the job, she said it was hard to maintain a positive point of view sometimes. This made me really sad and she continued to say that, in her experience working with the FDA, she could count on one of her hands the number of people who have joy and seem legitimately happy to come to work every day. I began to think about it and I realized that, even though I haven’t been here for very long, that I could only think of three people. Everyone else I’ve met seems either bogged down by the stress of their jobs, jaded because of their poor experiences, or just completely uninterested.

There are a couple of different ways this could be rationalized. One is that people at the FDA realize this, and that’s the reason there are so many programs for connecting and building friendship and mentorship networks. Another could be that people aren’t fully aware of the resources available to them so, in not taking the opportunity to try new things, they’ve become bored by the same routine. The last possibility I came up with was that the programs they put on aren’t anywhere near as entertaining as they sound and are a huge time waster. However, the last option doesn’t seem as likely any more. Since my last post on Organizational Culture, I got the chance to attend one of these events. In it, we did a DISC assessment to learn more about ourselves and the role we play in the workplace. It was a very fun and nurturing environment and I actually got to learn a lot about my peers in the workshop and even coworkers who weren’t. This pointed me back to my second hypothesis. In this next week I think I’m going to start asking a couple of people about it to see if they know about it, if they choose not to use it, or if they think it helps them or not to try to get a better sense of why so many people seem disappointed.