Life in Pictures

No matter the country, Health and Safety in the workplace is a thriving industry. We used to spend countless hours in group sessions and the companies organising training days made a fortune. The reality was, of course, that very little practical changes were ever observed. But we ususally got a free lunch out of our employer and we considered that to be a victory.

Sweden has a similar culture, in our workplace at least. A special group of employers and management charged with protecting our well-being. I haven't seen anything come out of it, which I interpret to mean that are lives are just fine as they are. To be fair, the setup in my Swedish offces far exceeds the standards I encountered in New Zealand. It's important to keep a sense of perspective on these things. That being said, being Better doesn't automatically mean Good. There's always room for improvement and our workplace is no exception. You have to be careful when criticising in Sweden. Swedes ahve a nasty habit of taking anything negative as a personal insult. It is very difficult for them to seperate the person from the role. Not something I am used to coming from an English culture land, so I've had to learn to think Swedish before adding my opinions. Back in NZ we had no trouble saying that a particular idea was a stupid idea, there was never the risk that somone would think that we were saying that they personally were stupid. Not so with Swedes. So one must tread with care.

Over the past 6 months or so we've had a few group meeting to discuss and assess our workplace environment. Last Friday we had a full office gathering to work through some of the key issues which had been highlighted. As luck would have it I ended up in the group headed by our office manager, who is not the most confrontational at the best of times. Everytime someone raised a concern, we were met with every excuse in the book as to why it couldn't be changed, or why it was up to us (ie not him) to change it. Extremely defensive. It got to be rather tiresome and I lost interest quite quickly. At the end of it all, our regional manager gave a bit of summing up and then that was that. Put a tick in the corporate "To Do" list.

Following the formalities,we had a more informal session where we were each to give a short presentation about ourselves. Nothing was scripted but the idea was that we could all get to know each other as people rather than as professional colleagues. We were to prepare a Powerpoint presentation lasting for a maximum of 2 minutes per person. I struggled a bit with this. Not because I couldn't think of anything to say, but to find visual material to include. When we were packing up to move to Sweden, I had to be quite ruthless about what could come and what had to be chucked out. Probably about 90% of all the photos I had went into the "chuck out" pile. My reasoning at the time was simple enough. Anyone who would have been interested in the photo, was either there at the time, or already knew what had happened. We had piles of photographs when, the reality is, that there are few people other than ourselves who will ever been interested in looking at them. I had to apply the same thoughts when it came to all our dog showing ribbons and trophies. They would have nearly filled a shipping container on their own. I was the only person who they meant anything to, and I was there at the time they were presented. So, as much as it saddened me, they went as well. The end result is that I don't have a lot in the way of pictures which show my life. A lot of digital stuff from since we have been in Sweden but very little from my youth. Fortunately I managed to pull together enough grainy images to give a bit of a pictorial history to fill in the alloted 2 minutes.

It was very interesting to see what my co-workers had prepared. Some were rather predictable but several showed a rather surprising side of a person which I never would have guessed. It was a little disappointing that more people didn't choose to cotribute and most disappointing that not a single member of management chose to participate. That said a lot and explained a lot about why we had a need to have a formal session in the first place.