Corporate Culture

Team building can be done in many ways. Personally I like the idea of creating good bonds between people. Friends tend to not want to let each other down. Then again they might not take things too seriously if the environment is too relaxed and friendly. This should however not really be a problem in a professional environment. I find it interesting to see how team building and social activities are managed at different companies and different sites. Although I think I missed a few at my current position I had the pleasure of attending some. So far they have mostly centered around two things and been performed in two ways.

One is the company “fika ” on Thursdays, a afternoon coffee and tea time where time is taken to eat some pastries and drink a cup of something together. This is an extremely common occurrence in Swedish working life. It´s also an important bonding ritual that cannot be neglected of one want to maintain good relations. Usually people take turn to bring fika or bake something. I´ll try to get back to the nuances of fika another time as it´s much too complicated and stretches into social dynamics way out of this specific context. 

The other one are shared activities with some sort of food and drinks involved. These tend to be either management organized with the company paying and planning it or “employee organized” where people chip in and contribute to doing something together. For the second alternative has mainly been “knytisar” of different sorts. A knytis is literally a potluck and can range from very organized to just bring something and let’s see what we get.

Workload

The workload has been increasing rapidly and I now deal with four major tasks at work. One of these has been the first contact with CPI in a lean environment. Something that has been tricky to say the least. Not having much experience as a tech writer it´s been challenging working with a project that changes direction every week and getting larger and larger by the day. However it´s my project and I´ll be dammed if I can´t make the end result be, acceptable. By that I mean be outstanding from someone with my limited experience. Working towards telecom one might guess what companies I write for in Sweden. The most challenging task aside from getting the right technical information in time has been starting working with the range of the client’s tools and accesses. These two factors can probably take up to 50% of my time on projects. I guess there is just one thing one can do about it. Be a bit of a bitch and get in people’s faces until stuff happens. Usually literally getting into peoples face is the best way. Always arm yourself with a good smile and people skills though. Swedes and I think people in general have a real hard time saying no to people face to face when they think it´s a reasonable request.
I think to manage technical writing fast one needs two things: a good feel for structure and a way with technology or academia. One does not need to understand everything and this is where the shoe needs to fit. I think understanding is superfluous at times as a tech writer. It is great to understand, but it´s not always feasible to understand everything for every project. The important thing is to understand enough. I guess this takes one to the old dilemma of the good enough concept.
My approach is much like one would to back in school. Look at examples, analyze and re-engineer. Trying to divide your way of describing things in modules that has been proved to work will minimize chances of getting things wrong and also your creativeness. Then again how creative is a tech writer supposed to be?
It will be interesting to see how a dyslectic like me will fare throughout this project. So far all feedback has been over expectations. If I can manage my projects and my time here with good or great reviews I think I´ll give myself a pat on the back and determining I can do writing as a profession, with a little help from the spell check function and lots of read troughs ;)