I work as a lecturer for an educational institution with branches all over the country. My branch is regarded as the finest in the whole organization, and this story is about the time I realized why.
Around five years after I started working there, the board of directors of our organization decided to gather all the lecturers at a conference hotel. The idea was to exchange experiences and generally have a nice time with our colleagues.
We were organized into groups based on subjects. All lecturers from different schools who taught the same subjects would be in the same groups. The day’s program would be decided by different groups: the program for [subject #1] lecturers would be set up by [City #1 School], the program for the [subject #2] lecturers would be set up by [City #2 School], etc.
My school happened to be responsible for setting up the program for my subject. We did some planning before the conference and decided that it would be a good idea to share experiences and resources and generally converse about how we went about doing our jobs. Our colleagues from the other cities thought so, too; we spent the day discussing all sorts of case studies and methods, generally learning a lot from each other.
During these talks, I realized the first reason why my branch is the best in the organization. We were discussing our methods when I showed one of my junior colleagues from another school some resources I had on my laptop. You know the sort of thing: PowerPoint presentations, written documents, spreadsheets, etc. She leaned in and studied my stuff eagerly, eventually muttering:
Colleague #1: “I don’t have anything like that.”
Me: “Well, they’re fairly easy to make, but the reason I have so much of this is that I’ve worked on it for five years.”
Colleague #1: “Well, I just started this fall, so I’ve only been working here for five months. It’s my first job, so…”
Me: “Do you want some of this?”
She looked at me, surprised.
Colleague #1: “Really?”
Me: “Uh… yeah? It’s not secret or anything.”
Colleague #1: “I can just… have it?”
Me: “Sure. What are you interested in?”
Colleague #1: “Well… all of it, but…”
Me: “Okay, I’ll set up a shared link for you. Hang on.”
I collected pretty much everything I had made for work over the past five years — PowerPoint presentations, syllabuses, and timetables; tests and evaluation criteria; collections of suitable literature complete with specific page numbers so they could easily be matched with subjects; lists of links to relevant web articles — a whole bunch of useful stuff.
Colleague #1: “Wow, this is great! This could save me a bunch of time. And it’s okay if I just reuse this?”
Me: “Sure, I don’t see why not.”
Colleague #1: “It’s just that we’re not really used to sharing resources like this. I’ve found some stuff online, but…”
Me: “Hold up. Hang on… You don’t share your ideas with the other lecturers? Why not?”
Colleague #1: “Well, it… Huh. I guess it just never really occurred to us.”
I looked around the table at the other people who taught the same subject as me. They seemed equally perplexed.
Me: “Do none of you share resources? Plans, timetables, lecture presentations, notes…?”
Colleague #2: “Hm… Not really, no…”
Colleague #3: “I guess we do sometimes… but no, we mostly just build our own stuff from the bottom up.”
Me: “Well, feel free to use my stuff. You can make changes, too, if you need to. There’s no copyright on this.”
Colleague #1: “This is awesome!”
It turned out that our branch had developed a culture for sharing information and discussing things freely while the other institutions had much less interaction between their lecturers. To me, the free exchange of ideas has always felt like a very natural thing (especially given that we are, you know, a freakin’ school), and my managers encourage it. My coworkers and I borrow stuff from each other all the time. Apparently, this wasn’t common practice everywhere in the organization.
After the conference, we heard that the other branches also seemed to have a completely different idea of what this kind of conference was about. One subject group decided to spend the day watching a stand-up comedian they had hired. A different group spent most of their time chatting and lunching. For them, this was a social event. The whole day was just spent hanging around in a hotel, socializing. In fairness, the people who attended did say that it was very nice, but it wasn’t exactly useful to their actual jobs.
I hear things are a bit better at the other branches now, some ten years later, but the board of directors still considers my workplace the “cherry on the cake”.