American Work Culture: But hey, you have a beer keg in the office!

The Maletzky readings highlighted the difficulties of expats working within a different culture, explaining that  “many of these assignments are unsuccessful in that either the business expatriates return earlier as planned or they do not perform as well as expected” (Maletzky 1). The main reason for these failures cited in the article was the inability for “an individual to adapt to the host culture and culture learning” (1) which often was due to communication challenges, different social norms that hindered the ability for the expats to work efficiently, or challenging power dynamics. The article made me think a lot about how work culture can make or break a working environment, even if it isn’t due to an international work placement, but simply the office environment or culture in the workplace here in America. 

A friend recently posted this article about office culture in Silicon Valley, and I think it's an interesting anecdote about a specific work culture subset. I have a number of friends who live in San Francisco and work for the tech-savvy start ups described in this article, and I myself interviewed at a number of similar office environments when I was looking for jobs in Boston.  Here’s an exerpt that describes the lifestyle of some stereotypical start-up “work culture”:

Culture is not about the furniture in your office. It is not about how much time you have to spend on feel-good projects. It is not about catered food, expensive social outings, internal chat tools, your ability to travel all over the world, or your never-ending self-congratulation. Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control inside companies. Culture is usually ugly. It is as much about the inevitable brokenness and dysfunction of teams as it is about their accomplishments. Culture is exceedingly difficult to talk about honestly. The critique of startup culture that came in large part from the agile movement has been replaced by sanitized, pompous, dishonest slogans. Let’s examine popular startup trends that are being called “culture” and look beneath the surface to find the real culture that may be playing out beneath it. This is not a critique of the practices themselves, which often contribute value to an organization. This is to show a contrast between the much deeper, systemic cultural problems that are rampant in our startups and the materialistic trappings that can disguise them.

In American culture, I think that many of us are overworked. Indeed we receive much less vacation than our European counterparts. In an attempt to make the work environment “fun” this subset of work culture has emerged that tries to address some of these problems. However, I know my friends who work for this type of company have beers at the office after work instead of going to happy hour nearby, and don’t even take vacation because although their company has an “unlimited vacation day policy” the social pressures from coworkers to overwork means that they don’t ever take vacation days at all. What does this subset of work culture say about American power dynamics in the workplace? What does it mean to be a “cultural fit” in the office environment? Should companies be able to “reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they ‘aren’t a culture fit’ while not having to examine what that means - and it might mean that we’re all white, mostly male, mostly college-educated, mostly young/unmarried, mostly binge drinkers, mostly from a similar work background” as the article says?

Finally an example from Japan of someone who died of "karoshi” which is officially a “death from overworking”. What does this have to say about global competition in the workplace and the effects that this has on work/life balance?