People Person: Is it possible during this current “physical distancing” situation?
Introduction
This article is one of the elective topics which I felt need to be discussed, as the pandemic won’t allow students of the Software Project course to meet offline. I was going to discuss how does a people person whom the criteria as mentioned in this article can be very impactful on a project team. But as the government obliges us to stay at home, I will discuss how to utilize your social media and still be a people person w.r.t.this article. Without further to do, let’s get a brief idea of how can someone be categorized as a people person.
People Person: TL;DR
A people person is a person who enjoys or is particularly good at being around people. Some people are naturally like this, but others have to put in extra effort into being a people person. There are many advantages to being a people person in social, romantic, and even work relationships. The main problem is how do you get yourself “around the people”, which is your teammates when you’re stuck at home waiting for this pandemic to be over. As I mentioned above, this is the power of social media and will help us conduct methods (not this method()) discussed in the article.
Method 1: Varying your daily interactions
Step 1: Engage people you meet wherever you may be
This will confuse you at first sight, but didn’t you notice, outside Whatsapp/LINE/Telegram group, you do engage with your teammates from other social media, like Twitter and Instagram.
Try to respond to his/her updates, try to be curious of what they experienced. But never judge them according to their updates. Always communicate personally if you feel something’s not right with the update, especially if you’ve ever felt those updates made him forget to code on the ongoing sprint.
Step 2: Avoid robotic responses
Try adding personality to your conversations, like telling them how you feel, during retrospectives or even a simple pep talk outside the project. Avoid asking questions like “how are you?”. Try to be more specific, by studying his background.
Step 3: Ask open-ended questions
As mentioned in the article, people like talking about themselves. With this technique, you will reduce asking questions leading to a “yes” or “no” answers. This is very useful to compliment step 1, as your teammates will enjoy talking with you, even separated by physical distancing.
Step 4: Listen to the person, showing genuine interest
In video or voice calls, it is just the same as normal offline meetings. But on text-based conversation, people nowadays love to say things in many bubble chats, not in a single bubble chat. If you’re using Whatsapp or Telegram, you can wait until your teammate has stopped typing.
Step 5: Be aware of your tone
In apps like Google Meet, Zoom, or any online conferencing apps it is the same as our routine offline meetings. But do you notice that now we can also describe someone’s mood on how do they type text messages?
Method 2: Making Yourself Available
Step 1: Meet up with people to take care of errands
With video conferencing apps, such as Google Meet and Zoom, you can arrange a meeting for doing other courses assignment together. This is a very perfect time to support each other and sharing ongoing difficulties with our teammates.
Step 2: Make plans for weekends and evenings
Online refreshing through games Nintendo Switch games like Animal Crossing will create bondings with your teammate, as you will spend more time with them, knowing each other throughout the game.
Step 3: Volunteer your time
This step is a prerequisite for steps 1 and 2. Especially if you got other things that are important to be done. Time management comes in hand, and trust me, you will gain more respect from your teammates.
Method 3: Appearing Approachable
Step 1: Understand a magnetic personality
There are 6 steps included in the article. I will sum it into only 1 step.
This is very important in these times because you need to keep in touch with your teammates online. The secret to having a magnetic personality is only to be friendly and to stay as relevant as possible to your teammates.
If your teammates kept a “distance” during these times, self-reflection comes in hand. Self-reflection is important to understand and evaluate your current attitude. Everyone has bad days, but a positive attitude can elevate your bad mood and influence others to feel good as well.
Conclusion
This is quite rough, I am also still finding a good way of maintaining good communication with my teammates. But I hope these steps will urge you to care for people more than now. Don’t forget to #StayAtHome!
References
Chernyak, P. (2020, January 10). How to Be a People Person. Retrieved April 15, 2020, from https://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-People-Person
