Wednesday, July 05, 2006

a great place to work

how much can you say about a company you've been working for for 3 and a half days? Not much you'd probably say, but after those 3 1/2 days of introduction and the first steps on my projects I feel like sharing some insights, and the coffee break yesterday fit perfectly into my view on things...
Let's start with the coffee break, every day at 10am one employee (we're about 20) prepares the break for everyone else, coffee, fruit juices, tea, croissants, bread and marmalade, simple things but it has a certain family feeling. And yesterday because someone else is taking some responsibilities of someone, the two prepared a real breakfast: Züpfe, different breads, Berliner, Nutella, boiled eggs, ham, different kinds of cheese, cantadou, melons, joghurts, birchermüesli, everyone around the big table and then our director and another employee were playing the piano and singing a piece from Schubert... Instead of 15mins it was a 1 hour break, but if you thought this was a cosy, relaxed working environment then I'll prove you wrong. As I didn't work this one hour, I have 3/4 of an hour less to enter into the working-time-management software, where I have to record every 1/4 I work and assign it to either a specific project I'm working on or to the adminstrative task I've been busy with. I have one main project and a 2nd smaller one, and I had to do a plan for the next three months for both of them. You know the kind of excel-sheet that we were doing our yearplans with until my LCP-term, tasks and their respective subtasks on the left, days and weeks on top. Just that this time, it's detailed up to how many hours I plan to work on which subtask in each project. Did I already mention the plan I got for the first two weeks where every hour is assigned to either introductory meetings or individual work? :-)
One aspect I appreciate a lot is that information is shared with everyone. We get the evaluations from every seminar to see wether people have been happy with the quality provided or what needs to improve, or my supervisor discussed the project proposal with me, what the budget of our proposal looks like, what external partners pay for this mandate and how much is calculated for salaries of people involved.
Everything is so organized, in place, structured and seems to be working... my experience from LC work helps a lot to understand things - well, the planning, the balanced score card, corporate design (we call it branding) etc. - but it's also disappointing to see that in an organization that's been existing for more than 50 years we never managed to introduce this level of "organizedness" but instead creative chaos reigns. Don't get me wrong, I think it's amazing that so many generations of AIESECers get the opportunity to build things from scratch, or completely change an organization, but you know that thing about not reinventing the wheel...
Right now my head is completely filled up with new information and it all needs to settle down before I can create something useful tomorrow...

1 Comments:

zuzka said...

a couple of more breaks like this and they will completely spoil you ;)
enjoy and bring your mum's marmelade too
big hug

6:16 PM  

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Name:sarita
Location:Switzerland

THIS IS: a personal logbook, capturing experiences, rencontres, thoughts and ideas; a way to stay in touch with family and friends, letting them know where I am, what I'm doing and how I feel I AM: a swiss farm girl, somehow studying at the Institute of International Studies in Geneva right now, but I spent half of last year in India, working and travelling I LIKE: cats, Lindor chocolate, books that make me forget the world around me, playing around with html, getting hugged, drinking milk coffee, meeting new interesting people, talking to friends and living live consciously I DON'T LIKE: the "skin" on the milk coffee, arrogant people, not getting noticed, if life's only a big blur

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Past and Current Readings

  • Donna Cross: Pope Joan
  • Jung Chang: Wild Swans
  • Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • Amitav Ghosh: The Glass Palace
  • Brian Moore: The Magician's Wife
  • Noam Chomsky: Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
  • Paulo Coelho: Eleven Minutes
  • Paulo Coelho: The Fifth Mountain
  • Joanne K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
  • Asne Seierstad: The Bookseller of Kabul
  • Dan Brown: Deception Point, The Da Vinci Code, Digital Fortress
  • Sue Monk Kidd: The Secret Life of Bees
  • Douglas Adams: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
  • Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner
  • Daji Sijie: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
  • John Irving: A Son of the Circus
  • Gil Courtemanche: A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali