A Social Experiment on Corporate Culture
One of the first things I did when I joined my family business was to clear my workplace. As I rotated through the different departments, I cleared all the old catalogues, previous employees’ discarded belongings, and other misplaced storage items. One morning, as I was moving out a pile of junk, I noticed a very old table plant. I asked whose it was and nobody seemed to know. This plant was alive and well, so I changed my question to, “Who’s taking care of this?” A colleague, BT, said she had noticed the plant on her first day of work a few years ago and decided to just start watering it and caring for it. That piqued my curiosity and I prodded further, “Why are you taking care of something that doesn’t belong to you?” “I saw it withering and just started watering it,” she replied. I thought to myself, it wasn’t the job of this employee to water and care for this plant. Yet, when she saw something withering in front of her, she automatically started caring for it. These ar...