No one told me the unspoken rules!

My "desk buddy" at work jokingly told me that there were unspoken rules when you shared a desk, so unspoken, I thought, that I didn't even know what they were! This got me thinking how many other unspoken rules are there within my team that new staff don't know?

I was once told the best way to find out the true culture of a business was to ask them to finish this sentence: "Around here it is acceptable to...". For example, the culture of my company used to be, "Around here it is acceptable to swear at a manager". I have previously written about professionalism, of which I don't count swearing to a manager to be, but there is swearing and there is swearing, right? A joke is a joke, a expletive can be used as an adjective, but, a personal attack is something bigger and much badder. But I think the "Around here" method does seems to work.

So how do new staff know what the right cultural fit is? And how do "old timers" change their ways when the business establishes a new set of values?

Woody Allen once said that if you hire great people and get out their way, if you shut up, they will give you a great performance.

Pressure from "desk buddy" to release blog, so ship it!