Photo Courtesy of Cartage.org
I’m sitting in a red colored modern desk chair in ventilated room the size of a California king mattress. There’s a large white plastic desk in front of me that is shaped, after avid inspection, inordinately similar to the orbit of Halley’s Comet. Amongst the four sky blue walls surrounding me rests a television display, to which my once prized but now kind of boring laptop is connected. “The blue room,” as it is most commonly deemed here in the Wpromote office in El Segundo, CA, usually houses those looking to watch The People’s Court while they eat lunch. I’m elated to inform you that I’ve taken the liberty of inhabiting our special and relaxing “blue room” to momentarily separate myself from my friends and co-workers, and write my first addition to the Wpromote Blog.
My name is Brett Dierker. Let me tell you why I’m feeling a little like a communist.
In this addition, I wish not to join my colleagues in their success of informing our readers of the latest and juiciest internet and technology news (this is purely because I don’t feel I’d be able to holistically articulate a current event as well as they have). Instead, I would much rather force upon the reader a glimpse into a train of thought of a Wpromote Intern – a source whose reputability could and should be questioned. What I am set out to do here can be outlined with a question: When I come to work, am I working more for our clients, or more for my co-workers?
Without hesitation, I can say that the major motivating force behind my daily work is how it will be received by my department and co-workers. This, on the surface, is inherently shallow – but I feel like there may be some weight and purpose to working for your co-workers instead of directly for your clients. For clarity’s sake, I leave you with an anecdote.
When I first started to work for Wpromote in the summer of 2007, the first thing I noticed was the very apparent and almost overwhelming sense of camaraderie in the office. It seemed at that time that the various departments, all tightly knitted together (with quite a heavy workload), had little room for error or miscommunication. Our management was quick to accommodate any blips or interpersonal blemishes, because they were keen in their realization that grudges or drama between the few employees of a place that deals with many clients could be incredibly detrimental. Also, there was this uncanny work ethic that was prevalent in everyone, and I honestly couldn’t figure out where they were getting their motivation. I still to this day don’t know why the rest of my co-workers work so hard, but do know from that point on (and still to this day), I’ve received most of my motivation from my aspiration to lighten the load of my friends and co-workers and to make them more comfortable (and enjoyable).
So, say one of my tasks for the day is modifying a client’s meta titles & descriptions. I’m not sitting here stoked out of my mind because that client is going to rank higher in search engine result pages - I’m more stoked that I’ve adequately lifted a portion of the workload from my department. Now, I’m not sure if this is a “bad” thing, but I feel justified arguing for it in following manner: With the utmost sincerity, out of all the clients I’ve indirectly worked for, I’ve never had the pleasure to actually converse with any of them. I could only hope that if I were to actually chat with them, that we could share kind greetings and congratulatory salutations for our respective contributions to each other.
But, more than likely, the situation above is not going to happen. In good stead, I share kind greetings and congratulatory salutations with my various bosses & friends. I mean, is it so uncommon to want work for the people you see every day, to accomplish the collective goal of company growth? Over the past two years working with Wpromote, like it or not, I’ve learned that the best way to do business is to show strength of character not primarily to clients, but to your fellow employees instead. This place doesn’t run solely because of one person. With the type work we do, the assignments we get, there’s no room for just one hot shot. It runs because we feed off of each other’s work ethic, and want to prove to each other that we all have something substantive and novel to contribute. The product is absolutely phenomenal.
It’s refreshing to, every once in a while, analyze why you do some of the things you spend so much of your day doing. I’ve found that there are few occurrences more terrifying than getting lost in complacency and monotony, and I feel comfortable saying that I’m ever so lucky to work in an environment that fosters the contrary of such.
Until next time,
