Useful Terms: What We Mean When We Say...

Culture What you'll find if you put the office petri dish under a microscope
Alien That would be you
Ego Ecosystem The fragile world in which you live Monday to Friday, nine to five

When you first started your job, the nice people in human resources, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, gave you a whole stack of glamorous paperwork associated with your fantastic new life: health insurance forms for when you get sick, worker's comp forms for when you get maimed, 401(k) forms for when you get decrepit, and the designation-of-death-beneficiaries form for when it all finally kills you.

In that hefty orientation packet there was an innocuous-looking, nondescript piece of paper that you had to sign swearing that you are not an alien. And sign you must, or you would never see the light of pay. But you lied. You are an alien.

You are a complete alien in a whole new world until you fully understand the culture of your office and figure out how to assimilate to your new environment. If you are truly to succeed at work, your mission, Ms. Alien, is to figure out how to stand out while you are fitting in.

Our mission is to tell you how to do just that.

Mastering the Microcosmic

In the petri dish of office life, it's all about culture. Of course, with the dawning of the New Economy, people, most notably MBAs and insecure, twenty-eight-year-old CEOs, use "office culture" as a code phrase meaning anything from "We're child-friendly" to "We're basically children -- wanna see our ping-pong table and Coke machine?"

Yup, "corporate culture" is a big, fat, vague buzzterm that everyone and their HR department throw around all the time, but The Girls Who Call Us usually ignore its vital relevance to themselves. Attention, dear reader: all that corporate culture crap that might seem like nothing more than marketing hype to you should be the primary factor that determines how you behave in the office.

Corporate culture is not just what a company says about its environment. It's the Ego Ecosystem of your day-to-day reality. The truth is, when it comes to Officepoliticus, you gotta sweat some of the small stuff -- we're talking microscopic. In those first few jobs, we each spent an embarrassing amount of time as National Enquirer-worthy two-headed aliens that no one would take quite seriously due to a series of incidental cultural insensitivities on our part.

For example, when J started a new job in a super-duper corporate setting, she showed up that first week toting a five-foot floor lamp through the lobby because she hates that nasty overhead lighting. Coworkers stared in Alfred Hitchcock horror as she passed: clearly, the lighting was good enough for them, but this broad, this new girl? "Nooooo, she's too gooood for fluorescent."

An innocent mistake, but one that didn't make J look too bright. Anytime you introduce an obvious change, no matter how minor, to a highly codified culture in which you are a newcomer, it will be seen as alien behavior. And ya might just find yourself being left in the dark about a lot of what's going on around you as a result.

It's so simple to inadvertently criticize what you find in a culture you are new to. One of The Girls Who Call Us, Barbara, a sales account executive for a handbag manufacturer, started a new job and immediately began making myriad suggestions to her fellow salespeople and other coworkers about how to improve the office environment and the business itself.

From her first day on the job, she wanted to change the way everything was done. Barbara began rapid-firing memos to execs about how the processes should be altered and improved, what software they should all buy to be more efficient, and on and on. She kept it up for a month, until she became conscious of the resentment that was building around her.

What she saw as being passionate, helpful, and enthusiastic, her colleagues saw as attacks on how they had managed the business before she arrived. Essentially, she was slamming them. Barbara never managed to heal those relationships, and she left the job within four months; none of her suggestions had been taken.

When you enter a new culture, if you see areas for improvement, you must be careful to introduce your ideas gradually, and when you do so, be sure that you are sensitive to the fact that what you have found at the new job is the result of someone's decisions and someone's work.

We never stopped to consider that. In fact, we were completely mystified when what we considered minor episodes seemed to be such big fat hairy deals to others. We just couldn't understand why things were the way they were instead of the way we were sure they should be. We didn't know the rules, and we were pissed that no one would just tell us. As we matured, though, it dawned on us that everybody at work was just too damn busy to explain what we should have been able to see for ourselves if we just would have opened our eyes: if you refuse to fit in, you should get out.

In this chapter, we'll help you put your office under the microscope so you can study its unique culture. Understanding the Ego Ecosystem will help you avoid stumbling into culture craters that you thought were little divots. Not only that, but you will also discover how to put yourself in the right place at the right time, scratching the right backs so you can shine like Sirius, the brightest star in our galaxy.

Let's Do the Time Warp...

Time bends, sister. Each office culture has its own time zone and its own concept of "regular hours." Honey, there ain't no such thing as Standard Office Time. Understanding the Time Culture in your organization is of the essence. One of The Girls Who Call Us, Sigourney, for example, was viewed as a foreign body when she said: "Isn't it a bummer to have an eight A.M. meeting?" She knew she'd blown it when her coworker, smiling at a nearby Uppity, replied: "Oh, I am always here by seven, and I never leave before ten. In fact, the rest of us are in the same boat." Sigourney didn't yet understand her company's time culture: although she frequently stayed late in the P.M., she never asked, and didn't realize that she was strolling in hours later in the A.M.

A given office might have any number of time zones, and you need to adjust yourself to each one you deal with. For example, the subculture reflected in your division or department might have a very different dynamic from the overall culture of your parent company.

When J was working in a start-up new-media division, the pace was insane, and everything and everyone was fast, fast, fast. But the parent company was established, plodding, highly bureaucratic, and procedure-happy. J quickly learned that when she worked with people outside her particular department, she was in a time warp and had to slow it down: she spoke slower, had to deliver detailed printed proposals instead of zipping out off-the-cuff emails, and had to have incredible patience -- and not take it personally -- while hearing nothing for days and days from the Most Uppity Uppers for answers that could easily have been issued in ten minutes.

From The Big Sister's Guide To The World of Work by Marcelle DiFalco & Jocelyn Greenky Herz. Copyright (c) 2005 by Marcelle DiFalco & Jocelyn Greenky Herz. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Fireside Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.