Do you have your own user manual? Work With Me - a way for an effective and well-connected team [event summary]
Core HR
Do you have your own user manual? Work With Me - a way for an effective and well-connected team [event summary]
June 28, 2023
The idea of Work with Me – a space where employees can get to know each other better and understand how to work together – has great potential. On June 23, we met with Dominika Sawa, Kamil Puk and Michael Domanski who use this solution and we talked about the benefits and ways to use it.
As part of the first LinkedIn Audio, Kasia Ubysz and Kamil Wojewoda talked to our guests about what Work with Me means to them, how to use it to improve cooperation and communication in a team. But also about other ways to use this tool. It turned out that there are many ways that concern not only team collaboration.
Read our article and see how you can benefit from “Work with Me”. We also have something extra for you – a template with questions we implemented in Calamari.
Question: What is Work with Me
Work with Me can be understood as a list of principles by which a person works and which can be shared with colleagues so that they can learn more about themselves and avoid understatements. It’s also the rules of communication that you do not have to acquire over time, but you can learn much faster. In the case of changes in teams, it is a great convenience that makes it easier to assume good intentions in communication.
In such a document, there’s not only information about the style of work and communication. It’s also worth writing down your values and aspirations – the principles that we follow in our daily work. Work with Me helps you better understand yourself and others.
Question: How you can use Work with Me
Employee guide to cooperation with each other is, above all, a great help for new employees who come to the company and their new teams. Exchanging your Work with Me shortens the time to get to know each other and allows you to find a common language faster. For the new person, it’s also an opportunity to minimize the stress associated with the new environment, new people and processes she has not dealt with before.
This manual is also a great help in international organizations where cultural differences can cause misunderstandings. The possibility of reading Work with Me by the person you work with allows you to adapt your communication to the other person so that neither party feels uncomfortable.
Manual of Me can also be used as a decision-making model, based on which it’s easier to decide who we want to cooperate with and what we care about most in our work.
Although Work with Me is a subjective document, it’s also a good source of information about the employee, which is why it will also work well as support in recruitment.
This way, you can quickly discover who a person is and their character. Of course, this isn’t a document based on which you should reject a candidate. Still, it’s an additional source of information about the candidate, apart from the CV and the interview, which allows you to see the person from a broader perspective.
Kamil proposed a fascinating use of Work with Me:
Using the document with questions about the employee as references make it easier to obtain answers to the questions that are most important from the future employer’s perspective. If these questions are answered by both the candidate and his previous employer, comparing these answers will be an additional, valuable source of knowledge that will help verify whether the candidate has all the competencies that will make a cooperation with him beneficial for both parties.
Work with Me is also information for the manager on organising the team’s work. It allows you to get to know employees and adjust your communication style to provide feedback in the best way.
Question: What questions should be included in Work with me?
Work with Me should include information that will allow readers to get to know the document’s author, their communication styles and ways of working to reach each other and make communication in the team smooth and trouble-free.
The questions should include those regarding communication predispositions – both face-to-face, online, and asynchronous.
It’s also worth including a section allowing you to show others how to convince us of something. Knowledge about goals or people orientation is also worth writing down. So are questions about stress and criticism.
There are situations where describing the way of asynchronous communication is crucial.
Question: How to implement Work with Me to organization
Introducing such a document into the company is challenging because it requires convincing everyone that it has value. People need to understand the reasons and effects of such a solution to want to use it.
It’s therefore worth starting the adventure with Work with Me in the company by experimenting in smaller teams.
When creating a Manual of Me, remember that the document should be transparent and all information should be easy to find. You don’t need to write a lot. The main thing is to hit the point.
At the end
As our conversation showed, Work with Me can be used in many different ways and draw many benefits from them. Once again, we thank Dominika, Kamil, and Michael for sharing their experience and thoughts on this topic.