Few of us enjoy asking for help. Mostly because of the social threats involved: risk of rejection, potential for diminished status, and inherent relinquishing of autonomy. And in the workplace, where we’re typically keen to prove as much ability, competence, and confidence as possible, it can feel particularly uncomfortable to make such requests.
However, it’s virtually impossible to advance in modern organizations without help from others. Every day, especially when you are new to a company, we come across things we don't understand. Many times roadblocks are a result of lacking of crucial information, not willingness.
In agile workplaces, documentation is often out of date as soon as it is published. This means that the most relevant information (the most useful and up-to-date) is in possession of the so-called power players, the referents of each team.
In archaic corporations, leaders tend to hold information captive, securing power and using it as leverage in negotiations. In this kind of workplace, new hires are seen as nothing more than extensions of whoever holds the know-how and ability to make decisions, based off the experience they were able to gather empirically after years in the field.
A culture of collaboration
The answer to the question "should I inquiry my fellow team members about this?" depends on whether collaboration is a key part of your company culture or not.And that's what I love about Avature: Everyone, from managers to new hires, is one chat away from you.
It is difficult for me to express in words the speed and cordiality with which all the referents to whom I have made inquiries have responded to me. Cooperation between Avaturians is a company trait.
Its culture can be defined as 'peers training peers,' where shared learning is an ongoing process that starts with onboarding and continues indefinitely. This allows everyone to stay relevant in their jobs and grow their careers.
It's a similar approach to what happens in social networks, where everyone shares what they consider important and/or interesting, ensuring that quality knowledge is replicated and distributed throughout the community. When teammates are learning and sharing that knowledge with others, everyone becomes smarter and more effective at their jobs together.
Making it practical
And this isn't limited to the people, there's also platforms and events.
There's the Academia, a place where content is created by Avaturians for Avaturians. A site packed with on-demand courses on a very broad spectrum of engineering topics.
From simple things like version control, or tips on debugging with company developed tools, to really interesting and complex ones like the most recent course about "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," or GPT-3, a deep learning technique used to produce texts that simulate human writing.
There is also a web app called the Learning Lounge, a library of videos that helps new hires get to know the product we develop in-depth, in a fast paced manner. You would be mistaken to think that the Learning Lounge has no value to you if you can easily adapt to new work environments.
There are a lot of videos that explain and prove how to fulfill every role in the company, and once you are a valuable team member, there are also videos made by team referents that help you understand what you need to do to turn yourself into the next power player of your team.
I can't stress it enough, that's what I love about Avature.