Yesterday I caught up with one of the country’s most successful travel journalists who had just returned from a two-month stint visiting the latest hotspots, hotels and havens across the globe. We last caught up a couple of years ago to farewell a former colleague who was migrating to live on a Greek Island. Yes. Live permanently on a Greek Island.
More than 20 years after I gave my jet-setting friend her first job post university, she wanted to thank me. I was quite surprised by the gesture. It was such a long time ago. She wanted to thank me for making that first experience a positive one. Her subsequent experiences in the workplace were nothing like that first one and a major factor in her eventually choosing to become a freelance writer.
This was a woman who was never going to settle for a poor office experience. Even in her first few weeks as a first-time employee she was confident in speaking her mind. It was one of the reasons that I hired her. She reminded me that I had taught her how to plan out an edition of a magazine. She observed me doing the grid (as we referred to the process) one night and was curious enough to ask how it was done. So I showed her. Years later when she applied for a deputy editor position she was able to state with confidence that she knew how to plan the magazine pagination and landed the job.
Her expectation about best practice workplace culture meant that she was uncompromising when faced with poor conditions like bad leadership or nasty office politics. We reflected on a wonderful woman that we had both worked with, but on separate occasions, who didn’t have the confidence to move on from a mean girl-style environment and eventually developed a fatal nervous condition. We traded fond memories of a woman who was with us in our happy workplace cocoon in the early days but couldn’t adapt to any other manager or work environment, eventually anaesthetising the stress with excessive amounts of alcohol. It’s been well-documented that toxic workplaces can adversely affect your health.
But what of the impact of a positive work environment? My former colleague and friend shared with me her joy of going to work all those years ago. We were always laughing — even on deadline when we were literally working through the night and sometimes the weekend to get the job done. There were so many funny stories and great times that still make us laugh.
The thing is it’s not just the employees who gain from a happy workplace. Because my team was positive and enthusiastic most of the time, it made my job as the team leader so much easier and more successful than it might otherwise have been. We were actually up to our eyeballs in a turnaround business and I was under enormous pressure to increase sales and profitability. So while she was thanking me for a positive first experience at work, I felt compelled to thank her for making my first role as a manager such a successful experience too. It became the standard by which we both benchmarked every other work place.