Much of my job entails independent work, with a bit of guidance from my supervisor. With a lot of changes coming to the company as of late, I’ve seen most of my coworkers hopping in and out of meetings and it makes me a bit nostalgic for an opportunity to have meetings as well. Additionally, Panda has found that he is often attending meetings for his job. Suddenly I find myself sitting there alone, wishing I had more meetings to participate in.
I don’t get much interaction with my coworkers in terms of sharing ideas for what I’m working on, so it seems I’ve been compensating by engaging them in conversation, period. That ranges from a random observation to just asking if they’ll be joining everyone for lunch today. I don’t mean to distract them from their work, but I figure it’s a brief enough encounter that it can be a quick break in the midst of all their work. Or so I hope. Perhaps I am just an unwelcome distraction that they can’t bear to ignore or wave away.
I hope that in the future there will be a chance for me to work more in a team environment, exchanging ideas throughout the day with a collaborator. My supervisor is great, but I feel like I should only go to him after I’ve thought through some things so he can make a final decision or help guide me. But while I’m in that thinking process, I’d like to have someone, a counterpart, who is a team member at my level. Then we can bounce ideas off each other before taking them to our supervisor (versus me having internal conversations with myself…). Plus, sometimes there are issues that I just don’t know who to ask, so maybe this person could be there to help me think through that as well.
Even though I am an independent learner and I love my space, I wish I had a more consistent teamwork component to my work. It’s a nice change of pace from the usual “sitting at my desk typing away” pattern of work. While we do have a weekly meeting now, I think it’d be nice to have more small meetings too, or even just informal ones.
