Laughs at the office vs Seriousness
We have two different spaces in our office. one, in front of our building, contains our call centre, in the back we have our software development team.
Our call centre team seems to like a serious and quiet ambient because they are receiving calls so they want to avoid clients to listen laughs in the background.
Our software dev team, is very creative and unconventional, so we allow them to have fun while they are working.
My solution is to try to keep them under closed doors to protect them from each others.
But I think it would segregate them somehow.
how do you manage to keep alive those two kind of cultures inside your company?
i.e. I believe both are necessary
Office Team Office Space People
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I think this is likely to get closed, because it is basically asking for opinions. But the struggle I'm having is, I *like* this question quite a bit. Perhaps there's a way to edit it to be more fact-based, and eliminate the opinions, but I'm not quite sure how. It might be worth giving it a try. – rbwhitaker 11 years ago
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let me try to edit the question to make it more appropiate.... – Sd Reyes 11 years ago
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I like the question, +1. Does anyone have any successful (or failed!) strategies to share? – Casey Software 11 years ago
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I like this question, but do not have an advise. Of course responses are opinion-based, but thats the case with every answer (referring to rbwhitaker) – Christian 11 years ago
2 Answers
Why tip-toe around two cultures when you can kick butt with one? Consider for a moment that you can have just as much fun in a call-centre. In fact a call-centre that isn't manned by monotonous drones improves the overall customer experience.
Look at Zappos.com for example; their customer service is legendary, and their call-centre, whilst very informal, is very effective. Of course this approach depends on what you're selling, but it's worth considering.
FYI - There's a great book on the customer service-oriented culture of Zappos.com called Delivering Happiness. It helped me a lot when building my company culture.
Good question by the way.
Can a company have two cultures or, more specifically, is having two competing cultures healthy?
My advice would be find the best bits of each culture and come up with one collaborative culture which suits everyone and which then, by definition, opens those closed doors and allows them to come together which can only be a good thing.
I would suggest seconding people to other departments (not just these two departments) so they can see how others work, why they work that way, why it works for them and so on so everyone can get an understanding of what everyone else does and know and respect why the dev team are so noisy whilst the call centre is so quiet.
Jason
