Mediamatic’s business model is self-sustainability. From growing their own plants and running a compost and aquaponics system, to weekly communal tasks where most of the staff participates in gardening, office cleanings, lunch making ect. During my 5-month internship at Mediamatic, I’ve had to feed the fish in the aquaponics system, carry blocks of mycelium, clean up and weed the Mediamatic garden pots and help with pre-production for different events.
These communal tasks would appear on our work calendar once or twice a week and they were mandatory unless you had other meetings to attend to (they made sure that never happened). Despite the cold weather and interruption of your office work, there is something to be said about the community feeling of this practice. When you are taken out of the office setting and doing something practical, you tend to bond with people more. All the interns, old and new, got together and worked on making our workplace more welcoming and cleaner. Putting care into something together gives you a sense of community and makes you care about what you do. I made some of the best friends in the office this way. Honestly, you could easily mistake this heavily endorsed company identity and practices for a cult.
As much as the communal tasks bring people together, you couldn’t help but notice that not everyone from the office was participating. Besides the workshop manager who was there to guide us, the communal tasks were only done by interns. This created an even bigger unconscious division between the management team and the interns. Mind you, most the staff was made of interns who did all the dirty work. Yet we were often treated like disposable workers that don’t need to be paid and can be replaced every few months. The feeling of being used was not uncommon –but that is a bigger discussion about capitalism we don’t need to get into.
A good colleague of mine once said that “the people make Mediamatic”. Good hearted people help you get through anything in life and can even make a miserable job seem not so bad. I believe that is the key to working in an office and being happy. As a whole, Mediamatic is a good organisation, with respectable values, but is this the best execution of communal tasks?
If you truly want to unify your workers and make them care about their workplace, creating a hierarchy is not the way to go because in my experience, that tends to lead to dehumanisation and mistreatment of lower-status employees. I don’t believe an organisation can be run without recognising the importance of all their workers, regardless of status. I propose everybody, including management, takes a couple hours off their busy week schedules and grounds themselves in some simple good ol’ gardening.