Terry Coughlin
Professor Goyette
Research Design and Methods
3/30/12
Finding a Balance Between Pleasure and Productivity in the Workplace
Setting
The setting of my ethnography research is a bakery in Holland, Pennsylvania
called What’s For Dessert?. The reason I chose this site to do research is because it is my
place of employment. I have been working there since I was a freshman in high school.
The phenomenon that I am observing is the pros and cons of being very comfortable at
the workplace. The owner of the bakery is the nicest and friendliest boss that I, and
everyone else at the bakery, have ever come across. While there are many great benefits
to this, I observed several aspects of how his generosity and friendly personality have
negatively affected productivity in the bakery. I believe that it is important to understand
this phenomenon because it extremely important to balance enjoyment and productivity
in anyone’s place of work. There are way too many people in the world who don’t enjoy
their work and that may be due to an overbearing boss. On the other hand there are bosses
that let their employees get away with too much which in turn negatively affects the way
the employees work. The participants that I observed in my research are my boss, Pat,
and my co-workers Megan, Bridget, and Rob. Because of how much I enjoyed working
there through out the years, and because of how friendly I am with my boss, my
interpretations of my observations may have been influenced by these factors.
Method
I went into this field site as a participant observer. I had access to the site because
I am employed there, and did my research over four workdays, each shift being five
hours long. Unfortunately, since I was working and observing at the same time, I could
not take notes while I was observing. Instead, I wrote down everything I could remember
as soon as I got home from work. I understand that this gap in time has flawed my
memory when writing the notes at a later time but it was the best I could do.
Analysis
Characteristics – Pat, the owner of the bakery, is a white male in his late forties.
He is a very large man, about 6 and a half feet tall, and slightly plump, but not as
overweight as you might imagine a professional baker to be. He is very funny, friendly,
personable, knowledgeable, nerdy, and talented. Bridget is a college freshman that has
been working at the bakery for about 2 years. She has family ties to the bakery; her older
brother has been working there for a few years, and her older sister, who is now married
and has a career, worked at the bakery all throughout her high school and college years.
Bridget is pretty, tall, and has an athletic build. She is very friendly and is pretty much
constantly talking about something. Megan is the opposite of Bridget. She is the newest
employee at the bakery. The reason she is working there is because she is going to school
to be a baker and does her apprenticeship under Pat at the bakery. She is very quiet and
serious, only talking when she is asked a question or is asking for instructions on how to
do something. She doesn’t seem too shy; it is more just like she doesn’t care about
talking to people as much as the other employees at the bakery do. She is short, wears
glasses, and is slightly over weight. Rob is one of the few male employees at What’s For
Dessert?. He is a freshman in college and has been working at the bakery for about 3
years. He wears glasses, has a beard, and is kind of stocky. He is soft spoken but still
talks a lot, especially compared to Megan. Pat and Megan mostly stay in the kitchen and
do serious baking, while Rob, Bridget, and I do things like help customers, answer
phones, take orders for cakes, clean, bake, and what ever else Pat tells us to do.
Interactions – There are always conversations going on in the kitchen, it is very
rarely silent. There was one occasion I observed where Megan and Bridget were working
next to each other but weren’t talking to each other. Bridget was the one who broke the
silence by asking Megan about the band Maroon 5’s summer tour. This got them talking
more and more, with the conversation moving onto how the singer of said band is now a
judge on a television talent show about singing. Since most of the employees are around
the same age, we always have things to talk to each other about. Rob and I are into a lot
of the same music, and Pat watches lot of television shows that Rob and I watch, such as
The Walking Dead, which we talk about all of the time. I had spent spring break visiting
a friend in New Orleans and Pat was asking me all about the trip, while also telling me
stories about when he was there in 1983. This isn’t something that every boss would do.
Instead of just saying “how was your trip?”, “good”, “that’s nice”, which may occur in
other workplaces where the boss is more strict, my boss and I talked for a while about
everything that happened, and he was genuinely interested in what I had to say. Pat also
told a lot of jokes during the four workdays of observation, something that he does all the
time, which makes work very enjoyable. Some of the jokes were verbal and some were
physical. A verbal joke he told was “knock knock”, “who’s there”, “I ate mop”, “I ate
mop who”, which sounds very funny when you say it aloud. An example of a physical
joke is when he said he was going to stick a quarter to my forehead and I have to smack
the back of my head until the quarter falls off. It wasn’t until I had already smacked my
head about five times when I realized that he only pretended to put a quarter on my head,
he didn’t actually do it, and I was just smacking myself for no reason. These jokes and
interactions have the entire staff smiling and laughing the entire work shift. Pat also
spoils us with good food. I worked and observed on Saint Patrick’s Day and for lunch he
made us corn beef and cabbage while we listened to traditional Irish music. We are
always listening to music in the kitchen. One night that I worked, it was getting closer to
closing time, so Pat put on a Lord of the Rings DVD on the tv in the kitchen. Pat is the
biggest Lord of the Rings freak I have ever met.
Episodes – Most of the time the employees spend at the bakery is in the kitchen,
but when a customer comes in, a bell goes off which tells us we have to go the front part
of the store and help the customer. There are some customers that we love and some
customers that we don’t like at all. An example of a bad episode, a customer that we
don’t like, is when someone came into the store while talking on her cell phone. She was
on her phone the entire duration that she was in the store. She was whispering to me what
she needed which made it very difficult. She was very rude and inconsiderate, qualities
that several other customers also have. Another customer asked us for a very obscure
cake to be baked for her to be picked up later that day. We explained that we need 48
hours for every order and she got unreasonably mad and didn’t understand how we
couldn’t make it for her and stormed out of the store. Another customer did not pick up
the cake that she ordered, and when we called her fifteen minutes before we closed, she
said she would be there in 5 minutes, but didn’t end up coming for another hour, so we
had to wait for her. On the other hand, there are many customers that we adore who have
been coming to the shop for years. One lady, Pattie, always comes in and buys a whole
load of desserts, and Pat, who usually never comes out of the kitchen for anyone, always
goes out front and talks to her, sometimes for a half hour or more. My mother is also a
regular customer. She came in one day that I was working and observing and Pat came
out front and talked to her for about twenty minutes about cooking shows and recipes.
Other instances that fall under the category of “episodes” are when people make mistakes
in the kitchen. While Bridget was making graham cracker crusts for key lime pies, she
was simultaneously telling a story to Pat. She was working very slowly while telling the
story, and Pat pointed it out to her, but not in a serious tone, they were both laughing
about it. When she gave me the finished product and I had to pour the key lime mix that I
made into the crusts, I noticed how sub par the crusts were. If Pat were more strict and
serious, the crusts would have turned out better. Other mistakes include Rob burning key
lime crusts to the point where they were un-usable. Pat had to throw them out, which
means he lost money from the wasted ingredients. Rob also burned a whole batch of
caramel, which had to be thrown out. Once again, if this bakery was very formal and
strict, instead of a bakery filled with people that are very friendly with each other and
always laughing, maybe these mistakes would not happen, increasing productivity, but
sacrificing enjoyment.
Reflection
When observing at the bakery, I noticed all of the ways in which my boss is
greater than what my friends tell me their bosses are like. We all talk and laugh for hours,
we’ve all known each other for years, we listen to music and watch movies, eat good
food, and he even asked me if I needed money at the end of my work week, giving me
100 dollars out of the cash register, which I had to write on my time card, so I didn’t have
to wait two weeks for a pay check. But I also noticed the ways in which these
characteristics of my boss decrease productivity of the bakery. Things like working very
slowly, burning things in the oven, messing up recipes, and not taking things very
seriously make the bakery work not as well as it could. This got me thinking about how
important it is to balance both work and pleasure in the work place. There are many
people who have strict bosses and have no fun at work, but are very productive because
they always have to work in a very serious manner. If a boss is very lenient you are more
prone to make mistakes, and be unprepared when get another job. Since Pat is the one
and only owner of this shop, and since it is not a chain, he gets to make his own rules and
do things how he wants to do them. But at the same time he has to provide for his wife
and four children solely from the income he makes from being a baker, so it is reasonable
for him to get upset when there are mistakes that make him loose money. There are many
people in the world who are miserable at the jobs they work, but the observations I took
at the bakery showed me how you can try to find a balance between work and pleasure by
interacting and opening up to your co workers, finding common things that you can talk
and laugh about, trying to have fun with each other and not putting dollar signs on
everything you look at.
Limitations
One of the limitations I had while doing this field research was that I was working
while observing. I would have had much more interesting and thought out notes if I were
writing things down while observing, but I was too busy to write anything down. I would
have just went while I wasn’t working, I would be in the way of people that are working
in that very tiny kitchen. If I were going further into this research, I would go to a
different bakery with a more strict boss, or a chain bakery, and see how different the
interactions are between those employees and the employees at What’s For Dessert?. It
would be interesting to see how people get along and how many mistakes are made and
what the consequences of those mistakes are at other places.