My employer has a two offices, one in the Columbus Ohio area and the other in Newtown, located in the Philadelphia Penn. metro region. Due to geographical circumstance, there is little each knows about the other, except both offices operate to develop consistent work as a single agency.
Spending a day there was like watching a dramatic reenactment of my own day-to-day work life, each familiar colleague in Columbus played by some strange actor on an almost identical stage of blonde birch wood tabletops and matte black office cabinetry in Philadelphia. The same office furniture, the same titles and office structure, the same office jargon, even the same water cooler and coffee maker. In my alternate work universe, these are some of the cast. And when I expressed these sentiments to my remote cohorts, it seems the feeling would be mutual, should they pay me a visit in Columbus, 499 miles to the west.
The takeaway from this encounter reinforced the notion that people define any organization, be it a unit of one or 1,000. Teams can have the same challenges, the same business model, operate in the same industry and with the same clients, use the same tools, and can drink from the same water spigot – but the experience will be inherently unique because of the people within.