Last day in office before I go for two weeks business trip. I managed to send out all my pending tasks, a dry run with my colleagues on my presentation, and we had a team dinner with abundant Bangladesh food and Indonesia desserts.
I love our office environment. I feel we are all friends, caring for each other, and very minimal competition among the peers. That’s a great feeling isn’t it? I don’t take it for granted because I’ve seen offices with bad vibe and people get depressed coming to the office. I’ve been reflecting what makes it so nice, few things come to mind:
- People. Indonesia culture is no confrontational, group victory above individual success, most of Indonesia staff support each other as part of their “duty”.
- Personal relationships. within the international staff, we like each other at personal level, we are open to discuss work struggles and personal life. This makes talking about work, even conflict, less stressful because we have the personal relationship as foundation.
- Different seniority. Peer competition often arises when people are at similar stage career stage, competing to stand out for the promotion. Among the 4 of us, we are 6, 5, 4, years apart which makes things easier.
- Leader’s style. The leader of this group is the most kind and caring person I know. This vibe is contagious, making us all naturally want to be kind and caring.
- Work life balance. We all value work and life balance, nobody will raise an eyebrow if we have a family matter to attend. We share tips on holidays, restaurants, bars, fun things, as it’s implicit that we are “allowed” to live our life, not just minion in a big organization.
Q: What do you enjoy the most going to office? Do you hang out with colleagues after work?
Our New Journey 
I would say that the culture on my team is not very healthy. There are some big egos on my team and they have tried to elevate themselves in the organization. But they don’t understand the culture of our organization or what our sales partners want so they are pissing people off in the process. My team has grown so much over the last 4 years due to reorgs. We are spread out across 5 different geographical locations so that doesn’t help matters. I honestly don’t really like a lot of people on my team so I try to limit my interactions with them and focus on my direct report and the sales group that I work with – and I like all of those people. I also love the portfolio managers I work with. I don’t know what I would do if I had my managers job, though. I would not want his job at all. He manages something like 16 people and is also kind of an individual contributor.
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I don’t hang out with my colleagues after work, but I love going into the office and having them around to help with thorny issues. We’re hiring someone new to the team and I’m already worried about them changing the dynamics and making it less fun to be at work!
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I do not hang out with colleagues after work usually, but I do have a couple of friendly relationships with my coworkers!
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