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yay team (rare experiences for me)
2008-Oct-01, Wednesday 10:13 pmOnce a year, AHS closes its doors to the public, buses everyone from 5 locations to one place, and conducts a day-long workshop. Today was my first time to participate in this workshop. I spent the day at the Arboretum with the other 200+ employees (with only a few of the legion of volunteers).
After the first small group sessions, we rejoined everyone in the main room. A spokesperson from each group summarized their results for the crowd. Polite applause followed each summary. I don't applaud for these occasions, though. I think it's a silly reason to applaud and detracts from the flow of the event. *shrug* But the more social monkeys do enjoy the group participation, it seems. ;) Anyway, our group was next to last. Our spokesperson got up and introduced herself (paraphrased), "Hi, I'm Jane. I'm a volunteer at the Saint Paul facility."
The crowd interrupted her with their loud applause. I applauded too this time, since it was a worthy occasion. The (underpaid, pay-frozen-in-2008) employees greatly appreciate the work of this "virtual" workforce. There are lots of programs done by this organization that could not be done at all without the volunteers. I was glad to see that we "real" employees seemed to be unanimous in our gratitude for their efforts. Yay, team effort. Not contrived team-building group activities in once-a-year retreats, but real life daily work activities. Stuff that matters. That's a good reaction.
Later on, we were supposed to go back to small group sessions again. Upper management spent so long going on about the issues brought up from the first session though (things that we were "not confident" about as employees) that we didn't have enough time left in the day to follow the schedule. We were given a choice of skipping the last item on the list and returning to our smaller groups as planned, or we could ignore the schedule and tackle the last topic instead. The topic was euthanasia. Well, specifically the topic was our employees-in-the-trenches lack of confidence that our organization was taking every possible action to lower our incidence of euthanasia of animals. There's only enough time left to do one or the other this afternoon. So, quick show of hands, who wants to go back to the small groups... ?
Not a single person in the whole auditorium raised their hand. Yay, team. :)
The long-winded speaking had gone on for hours, and I'm sure everyone else was wanting easier things to think about too, but nobody was willing to give up the opportunity to talk about this issue as an entire organization. I'm glad that the employees of AHS take very seriously their responsibility (both as individual and as organization) on this particular topic.
There wasn't time to turn it into a brainstorming session for any new things we could try, even if we had wanted to create one right then. I mentally drafted my list, though, and wrote it down as soon as I reached a computer later that afternoon. I'll send my ideas tomorrow after I ponder them some more.
I want to post later my thoughts on euthanasia, but I still need to ponder it a while longer to make sure I have some amount of certainty in what I write. I just wanted to say here that I am glad that this organization doesn't back down from hard topics, even when everyone is surely tired and ready to move on to more pleasant things.
Yay, team.
After the first small group sessions, we rejoined everyone in the main room. A spokesperson from each group summarized their results for the crowd. Polite applause followed each summary. I don't applaud for these occasions, though. I think it's a silly reason to applaud and detracts from the flow of the event. *shrug* But the more social monkeys do enjoy the group participation, it seems. ;) Anyway, our group was next to last. Our spokesperson got up and introduced herself (paraphrased), "Hi, I'm Jane. I'm a volunteer at the Saint Paul facility."
The crowd interrupted her with their loud applause. I applauded too this time, since it was a worthy occasion. The (underpaid, pay-frozen-in-2008) employees greatly appreciate the work of this "virtual" workforce. There are lots of programs done by this organization that could not be done at all without the volunteers. I was glad to see that we "real" employees seemed to be unanimous in our gratitude for their efforts. Yay, team effort. Not contrived team-building group activities in once-a-year retreats, but real life daily work activities. Stuff that matters. That's a good reaction.
Later on, we were supposed to go back to small group sessions again. Upper management spent so long going on about the issues brought up from the first session though (things that we were "not confident" about as employees) that we didn't have enough time left in the day to follow the schedule. We were given a choice of skipping the last item on the list and returning to our smaller groups as planned, or we could ignore the schedule and tackle the last topic instead. The topic was euthanasia. Well, specifically the topic was our employees-in-the-trenches lack of confidence that our organization was taking every possible action to lower our incidence of euthanasia of animals. There's only enough time left to do one or the other this afternoon. So, quick show of hands, who wants to go back to the small groups... ?
Not a single person in the whole auditorium raised their hand. Yay, team. :)
The long-winded speaking had gone on for hours, and I'm sure everyone else was wanting easier things to think about too, but nobody was willing to give up the opportunity to talk about this issue as an entire organization. I'm glad that the employees of AHS take very seriously their responsibility (both as individual and as organization) on this particular topic.
There wasn't time to turn it into a brainstorming session for any new things we could try, even if we had wanted to create one right then. I mentally drafted my list, though, and wrote it down as soon as I reached a computer later that afternoon. I'll send my ideas tomorrow after I ponder them some more.
I want to post later my thoughts on euthanasia, but I still need to ponder it a while longer to make sure I have some amount of certainty in what I write. I just wanted to say here that I am glad that this organization doesn't back down from hard topics, even when everyone is surely tired and ready to move on to more pleasant things.
Yay, team.