10 Avatars in team who make our task lists endless
By: Akanksha Sinha
Tags: Corporate Culture, Teamwork, Satire, Colleagues, Team

10 Avatars in team who make our task lists endless

In our professional journey, we come across people having myriad demeanours ranging from the supportive and motivating ones to the nasty ones. These surface under different situations and times.

In this story, I have summarized 10 avatars. We all keep toggling in these buckets at different times. These avatars have significant and regular contributions to our already overflowing task lists

Feel free to smile and don’t forget to hit the clap👏🏽 at the end of this article.

1. The Sick Lamb :

They are unwell most of the time. Believe it or not, they suffer from plethora of serious body ailments. Some of them, even unknown to humankind. Therefore, they are entitled to tons of unplanned leaves. Mostly these symptoms surface early mornings on working days. Mondays or Fridays being the preferred days. If they happen to land in office, you should be obliged that they have gone beyond the calls of their fragile bodies to complete their assigned work. You keep wondering how did they clear pre-employment medical examinations. While you and team members take their workload on your plate, you pray for their well being more than yours.

2. The Altruistic Ones :

They take sick leaves on behalf of everyone. It starts from their parents, children, spouse, brother, sister, pets, cousins, relatives, neighbours, distant relatives and goes up to the mouse in the house. By the time the mouse recovers, the neighbour’s bird has already been hospitalized and in worse scenarios even expired. The fun part is that their social media shows a birthday celebration for hospitalization.

3. The Planners :

These are diligent people who go home to far away lands. They plan and inform about their 10 days planned leaves well in advance. You are touched by their sincerity and sensitivity. The leaves are heartily granted. The story however takes a twist on commencement of their planned leaves. Suddenly, some unforeseen natural/unnatural/extra-terrestrial situations occur due to which they are stuck in the far away land. They now need additional 5–10 days to save the world and make their way back to office. Surprisingly, they end up landing in these extraordinary situations almost every time that they visit these far away lands. While you are annoyed to the core in planning this unforeseen situation at work, they may not even be available over phone. Well, they are fighting aliens, or a telephone tower is yet to be installed in their land. This lack of facility however does not deter them from usage of social media. While slogging with their additional work, you wonder how long did Tony Stark and team took to deal with the Ultrons. This might give you an idea when your team member would be back.

While the 1st three avatars are not seen in office much. The following ones sincerely come to office. No, they do not burden their colleagues by their absence. They burden the team by their presence.

4. At Loss of Words :

This set lacks communication and interpersonal skills. Don’t confuse them with the shy and introverts. Eventually, you and/or the team end up covering for them. This includes dictating and writing emails and documents for them, speaking in meetings and calls on their behalf, issuing follow-up statements for corrections or additions after they have spoken or written. The problem is that they lack the communication skill, they know it, and plan to continue lacking it forever. You keep wondering how they waded the job interviews before landing in the team. While you’re brooding over their communication skills, surprisingly they switch jobs with their communication skills intact.

5. The Newbies :

A new team member lands in your team. Your faith in God is restored. You start dreaming of a less fatigued work routine with a life component in it. Now, it's your responsibility to bring them at par. The KT is planned and executed with smoothness supreme. Your good days seem near. Now comes the testing time, with their first live project delivery. They stumble, but you and team support and pick them up. As they look towards you with those naive innocent eyes, you motivate them. You say — “It’s ok. It’s a learning. You’ll surely do better next time”. As time passes by, you realize these newbies plan to remain new forever while you continue covering up for them. Oh ! and the newbies switched jobs too while they were still new after three years of spoon feedings.

6. The Worried Mommies :

They are not the boss. They are not responsible for team deliveries. Irrespective, they are the self-proclaimed Mommies of the team. They hold themselves responsible for all successes of team and know the exact names along with reasons to blame in case of team’s failure. While you are discussing with your supervisor on your planned leaves, they look at you with horror for any kind of leave going beyond a week. That same look of objection, if you’d have asked the what is the password of your online banking. These mommies are always busy in their professional as well as personal lives. Sometimes, too busy to complete their assigned work.

7. The Cribbers :

They have all the facts available with them along with appropriate reasoning to convince you that your workplace and your life is unusual, troubled and failed. That doomsday is not far away. They find nothing good about the workplace, team, work, canteen, boss, seats, water cooler, ambience, the chaat counter outside your office. Nothing in the world can make them happy as they find the grass greener on the other side all the time. No, they do not add to tasks in your work plate but do make the ambience gloomy enough for the same set of work to appear burdensome.

8. The Merrier Ones :

They always have reasons and occasions to celebrate. They have plethora of planned and unplanned leaves lined up. They have some unavoidable and urgent situations of celebrations too. They have birthdays, weddings, festivals lined up in a row. It could be birthdays/anniversaries of their in-laws/spouse/parents/children/cousin/neighbour/local shopkeeper. It seems they have 365 days scheduled celebrations. They are honest enough to call out the reasons as celebration. But, either ways you/team end up sharing their work load.

9. The Fortune Teller:

You can call them ‘Mr/Ms Know it all’ or ‘Fortune Tellers’. Irrespective, they know the future and that too with proofs. While the project is its ideation phase, they already know the consequences. Thanks to them, many ideas are nipped right in the bud before even being explored. They have tons of experience to predict the future of almost all the projects. Sometimes, these experiences comes flow in from past lives as well. So as per them, if anything did not work 20 years ago, won’t today as well. They precisely know what will work and what won’t. God forbid if you are working with them in the ideation, analysis or prototyping phase. You will end up in circles till you settle your karmas of being their colleagues.

10. The Rockstars :

These masters of rich vocabulary, fancy diction and swag can create anything with their eloquent traits. So, aren’t they asset to any team? Well yes, but they become a problem and contributor to team’s workload when they limit the display of their skills only in front of clients, stakeholders, tech leads and managers. When it comes to deliveries and actual executions, they are nowhere to be found. They behave like a perfect front-end. The perfect models of any brand. But alas, they end up loading their team members by rambling their not so thought out ideas in front of clients and leadership and convincing them on the feasibility of the concepts within some random impossible timelines. Who bears the brunt ? Very evidently, the backends. But, they do make an appearance on project wrap-up days or award ceremonies.

Hope you enjoyed the read in all its satire. Do you know anymore avatars ? Do share in comments. Would be interested to know about them.

P.S. Please take this story with some light-heart humor and a pinch of salt. I have no intention to hurt any sentiments.