Togetherness

Togetherness is magic! It generates happiness, shared experiences, differing perspectives, a sense of belonging, and collective wisdom.

Togetherness often leads to the environment of being at our creative best. The reason for this is the fulfillment, encouragement, and collaborative advancement we experience by being together.

This is why families often focus on get-togethers and family functions. They enhance our perspective about ways of living, conducting our life with rigor, and discharging our duties. These various facets bond us together. 

Family get-togethers are a reflection of mindful culture building that yields introverts a safe place to express and extroverts have supportive audiences. Make us create developmental experiences to learn from and share with others.

Similarly, at work, the concept of teams is important. It's a reflection of togetherness that yields us productive advancement of our aspects of work, decision making, personal development, organizational progress, and the creation of artifacts valuable to the workplace.

Traditional, established workplaces have closed-door offices, appointment-based meeting systems, formal status tracking, and expectations-based performance management. Such a structure often is detrimental to long-term thinking and a creative environment resulting in a poor culture.

Innovation-heavy organizations however recognize the need to have an open culture suitable for creative people who often tend to be introverts. Bell Labs had discovered the importance of togetherness in a unique way. It created a co-creation space in a single location where sciences and engineers collaborated on the floors of offices space or across the floors in the same building leading to the highest amount of creative work in the history of technology. Employees of Bell labs were the creators of a series of unique innovations and patents owing to the culture that got built by providing conducive environment for introverts to have a safe place to express, experience and share.

What if every organization knew ways to create such cultures within their organizations early on? How often does the start-up that is solving a problem for the market think about why it may not be making a progress, gaining traction from customers, or retaining its employees?

The answer for this lies in inspecting how the organization is set up to fearlessly experiment and openly collaborate and confidently share. Such organizations are bound to make steady progress as Bell Labs found out in its early days. It wasn't successful automatically, it succeed with efforts and with suitable culture.

Worth giving it a thought in early-stage organizations struggling to get a foothold in the market and with their own employees.