Having a Ball Breaking the Chain

Day one

O.K. First day at the new job. Some good, some not so good. Mostly good.

Good:
• Beautiful new building. Huge, but SO employee-friendly. Built-in waterfall walls, lovely and numerous REAL plants and trees, massive skylights and windows. Comfortable seating arrangements in nooks around every corner. Outdoor balconies everywhere that will be great when the weather cools off. Wonderful cafeteria with varied fare (complete salad and sushi bar, daily choice of several entrees plus sandwich wraps and fruit bowls... and then there are the pastries!) Reasonable prices, too.
• Interesting people. Relaxed, helpful, welcoming. From the HR reps to the head of my department, all seem down to earth and friendly. Full time employees emphasize the advantages of working there, and seem to genuinely like the place.
• Promise of growth and the possibility of future opportunity for direct employment. Several people mentioned starting as temps.
• No nit-picking rules. There seems to be an atmosphere of trust. No actual timeclock, everyone is just trusted to record hours worked. We were also told we could basically set our own work schedule and can start our workday as early as 6 or as late as 9. We were also told if we needed days off to just mark them on the calendar. Breaks and lunch can be taken whenever we choose and lunch can be as short as 1/2 an hour or as long as 90 minutes, as long as we work a full 8 hours each day.
• Seems to be a fairly high level of intelligence, which would make sense, as the work is technical and exacting. Not a lot of repetition or "dumbing down" of instructions. They trust you to ask questions if you have them. Otherwise, they figure you're getting it.

Not so good:
• The building may be beautiful when you have a chance to move around, but the actual work space is a cubicle. A nice, clean, well designed cubicle with lots of storage and brand new equipment, but a cubicle nonetheless. I've never worked in a cube before. Not sure how I'm going to like it. There seems to be a lot of opportunity to move around and interact now, but the true test will be when we're trained and actually into our project. My team will have to do a lot of interacting on certain topics, but it remains to be seen how close and monotonous those walls will get.
• It's obvious that this project is going to be a lot of work. I'm not complaining about that aspect of it, but haven't been in the position of relying on other people to do their share of the work for a long time. My last two jobs, spanning over 8 years, have been as the graphic design department of one, responsible for the complete workload myself. As such, I set my own timetables and met deadlines I myself had set. It will be a whole new mindset to be accountable to and dependent on others to keep everything on schedule.
• SO many rules and regs as to how things are done. There are SOPs and addendums and updates and procedures for every aspect of the artwork, product inserts, instruction manuals, etc. Makes sense, considering that it's a bio-tech firm answerable to the FDA, but it's a lot to try to take in all at once. We don't have a lot of time to get up to speed with it all before we have to get moving on the work, so hopefully, QC will keep us in line.

Basically, my first day impression is that the work itself will be difficult, but if you do it well, you can expect to be appreciated and rewarded. I guess I'll find out pretty quickly if I'm right.

posted by Sheryl @ 8:24 PM