Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Often it is better to let people watch a game show at work while they eat lunch.

Here is a sad but true story.

In the early 1990s I worked in a big computing laboratory. At one end of the multi-thousand-square-foot facility we had a “conference” room. This room had a sink, a refrigerator, and a TV. Yes, people used the conference room as a lunch room. They would turn on “The Price is Right” back in the heyday of Bob Barker. They would spend an hour each weekday eating together and watching a silly game show.

These people became friends as they would eat together and idly watch Bob Barker and overly excited contestants. Side chatter wandered to side topics. These colleagues became friends who knew one another as real people—not just boxes in an org chart.

There is a funny thing about friends, they tend to help one another and grease skids so that things get done much faster and much better.

People who are friends tend to work together.

Someone, who didn’t like Bob Barker and also didn’t like the people who would watch Bob Barker, learned of this daily gathering. It is unfortunate that this someone had been mistakenly elevated to a position of authoritative management.

That someone declared with great authority and zeal that, “We’ve got to put an end to this!”

That someone proved their authority and had the “Price is Right” and lunch banned from the conference room. The persons who had watched the show together remained friends, but gradually moved to other jobs and were replaced by people who weren’t friends—they were boxes in an org chart.

Please refer back to “People who are friends tend to work together” and notice the last two words: WORK and TOGETHER. Those two habits vanished from the computing lab. The results were predictable and predicted. Work and quality fell.

That someone, who didn’t like Bob Barker and also didn’t like the people who would watch Bob Barker, moved on to another position of management to wreak havoc there as well for years to come.

I suppose it is time to summarize this story and find a moral or something. If you have read this far, you have probably drawn your own conclusion, but here is one or two of the conclusions that have come to me in the 20 intervening years.

1. Let people at work become friends—it pays.
2. If you find someone who wants to end friendships at work, move them out quickly before they ruin everything.