¿How can you describe a normal day in an office? Normally, it’s pretty boring, with a lot of paper to read or sign and a terrible coffee. That was my point of view before arriving to Polites.
by: Paula Pereira Lozano (ES)
I was expecting slow mornings, coffees without flavor and everybody at their desks with nothing to talk apart from planning the weekends.
Before starting describing the daily life in the office of Polites I have to say that of course everyday is not amazing. We have slow mornings, no topics to discuss and sometimes a very questionable coffee, but we always try our best so that type of things don’t ruin our mood.
First of all, every member of the team of volunteers have a task assigned: Alise is in charge of Instagram, Marianna of Facebook, Francisco of the blog and I’m the one who is always asking for volunteers to do a Tik Tok (an app that is not the most loved in the office). Apart from these “positions” we usually try to help each other. If Alise has an idea for Instagram I can help her to develop and Marianna will do the graphics at the same time if Marianna needs feedback for the graphic Francisco will say it to her. In this environment of a team it’s very easy to work and learn new things every day. I think we all have improved our creativity and imagination, especially using Canvas – our fifth member in the office -. Besides managing social media, we have to organize events like the past halloween party that happened in the office. For that task, we needed to think about the schedule of the afternoon and planned every game that we played with the other volunteers, apart from decorating the whole office. It was a success and everybody had a lot of fun.
Last but not least, we have to create workshops about our culture or interests to present in schools. This work we always do in the office because we can help each other with the design, the games that we want to play… I’m sure that this part of the work is the most difficult but, in the meantime, the fulfilling one. Basically, we learnt from scratch how to lead a workshop with creativity and entertainment. In other words, our public speaking skills – in a foreign language- had an incredible growth. Also, related to interacting and playing with kids, we work everyday to think about new games or changing the ones that we already played… This part of our routine is very important to understand how much we have changed. We are more confident in ourselves, we try to talk and listen in an assertive way, we understand each other besides the barrier of the language. We became a solid team that can do everything we want to.