Cultural note from a French-American office02 Jul
For the first few months, pariSoma had a skeleton crew of mostly American workers. In the last couple of weeks we’ve grown as we have added a new office administrator, visitors have come in from our French office, and now we have a couple of new French coworkers.
All of a sudden, small differences in office and general culture are beginning to pop up. Several different French people here have left the (main) room when they received a cell call, which is very common in France (and not unsual here, either). While that’s very polite, I can’t imagine it is an ideal solution in the long term, when the only other real room is a conference room. I can imagine one day in the future, 4 people huddled together in the corner between the main space and the conference room, trying not to be too loud on their phones….
Now, I know my noise tolerance is high because a) well, I’m American, b) I worked at a school for two years, and am used to plugging in headphones to cover the sound of kids screaming during their break. But in general, I assume an office will have a certain level of noise; people will be on the phone, or talking to one another in the office, etc.
This isn’t an insurmountable difference in working style, of course. It’s just very acute now that we’ve gone from a couple of us talking across the room and playing music, to 5 of us in the office being incredibly polite and noise conscious. I know eventually the membes of the space will define what the space will be like – and in the meantime, maybe the middle ground is to have a “quiet hour” in the AM, and then “headphones mandatory” hour in the PM?
5 Responses to “Cultural note from a French-American office”
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Hum, I was “scared” to phone the first time! Anyway, I’ll be way more loud from now on
The AM/PM stuff could be a good solution!
And of course, this afternoon, we were all loud (French and Americans alike). See, it all works out. But I agree – having a “quiet hour(s)” might be a good thing….
especially when there is loud house music from downstairs making the floor vibrate!
Good points…
For whatever it’s worth, I’m one of the Americans and I usually make a point of leaving the room, or at least going far away from anyone else, when I take a call because that’s less disruptive…
In the case of cel phones, it’s not so much the volume level that’s the issue; when we hear just one side of a conversation it’s more difficult to “tune out” that sound than most sounds, even sounds that are much louder than speech.
That’s my policy re: my own calls, but if you prefer to chat it up in the office I can tune it out with my headphones.
This is an intriguing subject though, because practices around this are quite different even within SF. In offices, people tend to talk on the phone freely. In wi-fi cafes, people tend to walk outside to take a call; those who don’t get a lot of dirty looks etc. from others in the cafe (customers as well as baristas.) A coworking space has cultural similarities to both cafe and office, so how will phone use practices evolve in these sorts of space? I’ve emailed a couple folks at other SF coworking spaces to find out how this is going for them…