If we work in a team there are many expectations that are laid on us. Some of them were never verbalized, yet they exist and are as valid as those listed in the job requirements.
So if I have the technical skills, I’m self-organized, and I deliver – what other traits do I need to have to be an effective team member? And how can I show them while working from home?
- Communication skills
- Internal motivation
- Positive attitude
- Pro-activeness and willingness to take a lead over an initiative
- Emotional Intelligence – Ability to understand the social context and act upon it
Understanding the social context
Understanding the social context is hard enough while we interact f2f and able to see our faces and non-verbal reactions. It seems almost impossible to do it when all we see are just small black rectangles with names written on them. To be fair it’s sometimes even hard to know if the person behind it is a man or a woman just by its name*, so how come the expectation is that we need to understand and be sensitive to all those subtle cultural, gender, age or role differences? Well… we need to do our best! 🙂
For what habits you would get an extra point:
- For being interested in another person’s culture and picking up a few words, that’s lovely!
- For being open to learning about cultural differences and for respecting them
- For bing empathetic with other points of view
- For being polite
- For acting with respect – discussing the ideas not the people
*A useful (???) tip:
polish female names (almost) always end on the letter “A”. It’s hard to give an example of a polish female name that doesn’t :
Katarzyna, Joanna, Justyna, Agata, Agnieszka, Aleksandra, Beata, Urszula and so on…
Male names usually ends with some other letter like:
Piotr, Wojciech, Tomasz, Paweł, Bogdan, Przemek, Macin etc.
There are rarely names that can be given to both boys and girls. If the core of the name is the same we still usually change the female ending:
Bogusława vs Bogusław
Krzysztofa vs Krzysztof
Wiesława vs Wiesław
