Recently, a friend of mine started to work for the same company as me. When she started, her job wasn’t directly connected to my work. But as she has been going through training and a few things have changed, she has started to work in the customer care department. Even though my new position with the company isn’t exactly in customer care, I still do a few hours each day covering that work until we have a few more team members. And since I have helped to train other employees, it made sense that I was asked to be a part of the team helping to train her.
The first part of the training was over Zoom because it was just going over a lot of the different spreadsheets and systems that the customer care team works with each day. I was a part of those Zoom sessions, but a lot of the time I was doing other work so I wasn’t fully able to participate in them. I tried to help however I could, but I know my focus was split and I wasn’t as involved as I would have liked to have been. But with the next stage of training, I knew there would be more opportunities to be a part of things.
After new team members are trained on the systems we work with and shadows while we work to see what it looks like to put everything together, the next phase of training is doing the work while you are supervised. So the new team member would be responding directly to our clients, but they would show their responses before they sent them so we could double-check everything. And I realized that even though this process has always happened over Zoom before since my friend only lives a few minutes from my house we could work together in person instead. So I made that offer to her, and she agreed it would be better to work side by side instead of over a screen. So for the past 2 days, I’ve been helping to train my friend while she has been over at my place.
I rarely get to work in person with another person. I’ve worked from home for so long and there’s no reason to work with any of my co-workers. Most of the days that I haven’t worked alone in the last several years have been when someone else happened to be in the same place as me, not because we were co-workers working in the same space. The last time I had a co-worker working next to me was when another friend of mine was observing my work so we could improve some of our systems. I do like working from home and I can’t imagine ever going into an office again for a day job (obviously, I can imagine going somewhere else for work if it was an acting job), but it can feel a bit lonely at times. I haven’t really felt that way too much, but during the worst of the pandemic, I was feeling very isolated and craved in-person connections. Now, I just celebrate these random times I work with someone else and they are something fun, rather than something that I have needed desperately in my life.
And getting to help to train my friend in person was really fun. She really had a good grasp on the work and the things I was pointing out or correcting were really tiny things that didn’t have to be changed. I know that this job has a lot of information to know about, but most of the work is only using a part of what we train on. But I totally get wanting to understand everything since I am the same way and I was happy to explain anything I could to help my friend feel more confident in her work. But I have no hesitation in my mind that when she’s working on her own, she’s going to do a great job.
I might work with my friend in person again in the next week or two when she’s starting to work alone. It can be easier to answer questions or help assist when you are in the same place and not doing it over text or Zoom. But even if we don’t work in the same space again, I’m glad we got to do this over the past few days because it really was something fun and different with my job.
You Might Also Like
Making Sure I Pay It Forward (Helping A Friend With A Job)
Another Job Through A Friend (or Excited To Do Job Training)
Having An In-Person Co-Worker For Once (or Work Plus A Friend Hangout)
Another Random Friend Hangout (or So Happy For In-Person Time)
My Strength In Real Life (or Helping A Friend Gave Me Some New Confidence)
Helping Out A Friend (or Getting To Act)
