Volta à infância: leitura des-verbal e formação de sentidos nos ambientes de trabalho de empresas de tecnologia
Authors: Perez Katia 
Published: December 2020

Nowadays, references to childhood can be easily perceived in workplace, especially in companies that take as a model the innovative, relaxed offices in Silicon Valley, California (USA). Both the architecture and the decoration of these workplaces suggest new senses, different from those formed in traditional offices. The employees of these companies, in turn, construct imaginary representations about the office - and, consequently, about the company - using all this shown material, in addition to their own experiences, memories, sensations and affections. In these communicational interactions, the highlight is the non-verbal language (Ferrara, 2001), where that childhood symbolic objects produce senses (Orlandi, 2012), suggest interpretations (Santaella, 2008) and create emotional bonds (Silva, 2012) in everyday work life. Studying these relationships that involve all the human senses in the communication process within organizations is the main theme in this article. As the objective of this research, we seek to understand how these organizational discourses are constructed in order to involve employees emotionally using their own experiences, recovered by childhood symbolic objects. Summing up: how are these shown discourses, involving childhood memories, in the work routine, materialized? As corpus of our research, we chose to observe and analyze the workplace of three multinationals from technology sector, represented by their Brazilian offices: Google-Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais, OLX-Rio de Janeiro and LinkedIn-São Paulo. The material for analysis was collected from images available on the corporate websites of these companies and on the websites of the architecture firms responsible for the architectural projects created for these offices. Collected data as well as its organization and analysis were based on Lucrécia Ferrara's proposal of reading non verbal messages, contextualizing in time and space each researched places, searching for "estrangement" - non-homogeneous elements or situations - and find out the "dominant" - the conflicting element in the observed environment (Ferrara, 2001). The non-verbal reading are based on the memories recovered not only by the act of seeing something, but also for hearing, smell, taste and touch. And these memories can be used to create new sensations and emotions - positive ones - for new perceptions of the corporate 'world'. In the three companies researched, which hired architects and decorators to transform the work space according to the companies' world headquarters guidelines, we found the non-homogeneous in the office organization itself. In this innovative interior, the presence of childhood symbols appear as dominant. This is the case of the Google-Belo Horizons popcorn cart, the giant slide at OLX-Rio de Janeiro and elements such as a swing at LinkedIn-São Paulo. We understand that employees' perceptions of childhood symbols refer to distant and pleasurable memories, brought by remembrance to other contexts and situations. And these memories and feelings are activated not only by the sight of these objects, but also by smell, taste - like as the popcorn cart - and by touch - as in the act of slipping or rocking. It is essential to highlight that mental and symbolic representations have an emotional charge brought about by specific moments, lived in certain contexts and recovered by memory through associations by similarity. This reading of the non-verbal material transfers the happy memories of employees to the workplace, to the company, and can contribute to the formation of meanings of pleasure and well-being for corporate world. The bridge between employees and the organization, for this image formation, is the symbolic material.