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Key to any successful business are the relationships amongst its staff, both employee-employee and employee-employer. A company that has great brain power, strong technology and an excellent product still will fall victim to bad internal culture. These relationships have to do both with financial concerns such as compensation and also with plain old (but fundamental) interpersonal relations.
As any company that has drawn on a consulting firm knows, teamwork is king among employees, which is why there are all those team-building exercises that are so ripe for satire. It’s easy to get too involved with the satire and forget that team-building is only funny if done poorly; done well, it’s powerful. No employee can do everything, so people must rely on each other to accomplish even the every-day tasks. Employees who like and trust one another are much more efficient; unfriendly relations are counter-productive, as people are less likely to go to one another for help.
Equally important are the relationships between the the employees and the employers. The employers are there to support the employees; if the employees do not think management respects them or wishes to support them, they may become disgruntled or resentful, which means they have less incentive to do their jobs to the best of their ability. There have been dozens of direct.tv movies showcasing this dilemma. Just so, if the employers don’t get along with the employees, they may be more inclined to micro-manage and take on more duties themselves, which only fosters further resentment among the employees, and so on. It may be a cliché to say that a company is a family, but there’s no denying it needs to function like one in order to succeed.
