I have two interviews scheduled for tomorrow!! Both are with defense/intelligence companies. When I budgeted time to go to the career fair today though, I forgot about the time that I would spend catching up with old friends who are now recruiting for their companies. :) I love running into people I haven't seen in a long time, and somehow none of those conversations today felt contrived or fake. I wish I knew how to surround myself with more people like that - friendly people who tell it like it is. No sugar, no fake smiles, no exaggeration of how close we were when we went to school together. I'm sure it helped that several of these friends worked for companies that I have no interest in working for, so they didn't have to give me their regular recruiting pitch. And it helps that we've all grown up a little bit.
One of the things I disliked the most about my first full time job was the fact that there was very little communication from the management. Everything was rumors. I would hear about agency changes from news headlines and blogs before, if ever, I would hear anything from my supervisor or the head of the agency. News of new projects would go like this: "There's been a buzz about some new work coming down the pipe..." I hated that. "Down the pipe?" It seemed like no one person or group was ever associated with a particular policy change or analysis request. I felt acutely aware of just how big the gap was between the decision makers (them) and the lowly laborers (us). To be fair, it's an extremely large workforce, so all-hands meetings to explain changes or answer questions are often unrealistic. And it's a government agency, so engineering development and Congressional policy get tangled up as motivations for change.
I didn't realize how much I disliked that type of company communication until just a few weeks ago. The engineering VP of my current employer sat down with each group individually (15-20 of us) and discussed how things around the lab would be changing with our new president coming in, what hiring changes were happening, how the company was growing, what new projects were coming in, and why current groups and divisions are set up the way they are. He explained things as they were, even if that meant admitting some shortcomings or areas in which the company needed to improve. And when he was finished talking, he spent the next 45 minutes fielding questions from our group. Granted, it's a lot easier to do that sort of thing with a smaller company, and I'm sure that the VP lost a complete day or two just going around to all the different groups to explain the same things over and over. But at least for me, that sort of communication has an incredible boost on my morale and feeling of worth in the company. It's nice to be informed, and it's nice to feel like your suggestions or questions have at least some, however small, impact on how things are done.
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3 comments:
I interned with a small company, I liked it quite a bit.
I think our organization's communication has improved a lot with Flynt.
That's good. I may have been overly cynical when I was there because I didn't know much about how the agency worked, so it all seemed very vague and secretive to me.
I agree with your feelings about information flow where we work, Melanie. Over time, I've realized that many of the people there, especially the older ones (though some of the younger ones mirror that attitude) just don't really care to know about the decision making as its happening -- maybe its because after that many years of the continuous winds of change every time there's a new mission, plan, or administration they go through it all again and they are sick of it. Those of us who do care just go to other sources to find things out in rumor form. When I started, that really annoyed me too, I just felt like a low man on the totem pole, completely out of everything. I learned that the way to approach it in our office culture was to just directly ask the question if I'm curious about something. I feel like the answers I've gotten are always open and direct.
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