Hej! It’s my last full week of work here in Stockholm and I cannot believe the program is almost complete! Even though I really feel settled in here and like working here in Stockholm is second nature at this point I am still very shocked that I will soon be leaving Sweden and heading back to the US for the remainder of the summer. The office is still relatively empty here in week 7. Most days I’m the only sitting in here getting work done, however, every few days I have a coworker or random visitor stopping by the office for whatever reason.
When there were plenty of people in the office during the first half of this program, I did get a sense of the communication style of the office and leave how most people, generally, communicate here in a Swedish workplace. Overall, I would say that the communication style in my office is very focused on high context communications, most people don’t generally speak with one another in person unless it’s a very specific situation. What I’ve observed is that peoples main forms of communication is through google chat, whether it be through the main group chat our office shares, or if it is a direct message only needing to hear from one person. I would say this is slightly different than what I expected but I can understand how this is the case. While I would think in an office that direct communication with colleagues could be good for office bonding and creating friendship I have found that these are mainly promoted by other means (I’ve talked before about after work gatherings and even Fika during work before in other blogs). I think that my colleagues primary way of communicating can help to keep people on task on their primary jobs instead of getting distracted by other conversations that may pop up as a result of in person questions and discussions.
Like I’ve discussed before, this is very on brand with my primary observations on workplace culture here in Sweden in general, it seems to be a very focused group of people I work with who don’t easily get distracted during their scheduled work day by random conversations and things on their phones. I’ve never worked in an office before but I would wager I bet that this is a slight difference from work culture in the U.S. as I feel working summer jobs and even just being a student that I live a very distracted life (this obviously could be a personal issue but I think generally its a consensus that we are easily distracted as a culture). As far as miscommunications go in my workplace, honestly I haven’t really had a situation where something was so miscommunicated that it resulted in an error from someone one way or another. The biggest examples of miscommunications I can think of are just simple words and stuff that my coworkers will not be able to think of when in a conversation with me. Overall, my coworkers all speak pretty much perfect English but there have been of course the occasional words here and there that have tripped them up which to me is obviously completely understandable and excusable.
So as I mentioned most people haven’t been in the office during the month of July so I have had to almost entirely rely on the chat feature to ask my coworkers questions or ask for clarification for assignments. Since my colleagues are all of various vacations and not just sitting at home I would’ve expected there to be a strong barrier in the communication between us but it hasn’t truthfully been as bad as I was thinking. My supervisor has been on vacation for like 3 weeks now and I’ve had an ongoing dialogue with her through the chat, asking her questions and sending her all of the assignments I finished for her approval and feedback. Of course there is occasionally a “lapse” in communication being a day or two without a response which has made slight halts in my progress but overall, I cannot complain given these people are on their vacation and there first priority is definitely not answering my question immediately. I’ve also been able to get all of my work done and stuck to the timeline we had in mind at the beginning of the program.
On a completely different note, we took a trip to Helsinki, Finland last weekend and had a great time on the cruise that took us across the Baltic Sea both ways. We boarded the cruise Friday afternoon and cruised overnight to Helsinki where we arrived the next morning. We then had the whole day to explore Helsinki and see what the city had to offer. Honestly, its very similar to the other nordic cities I’ve visited but I did appreciate a bunch of the differences and specialities the city had to offer, including the farmers market style setup they had on the marina area which welcomed us upon our arrival to Helsinki. I took a walking tour which gave us a ton of background on the city and also gave us some cool locations to visit in our free time including the largest Finnish Orthodox Church, the Oodi Library which wasn’t just a library but also doubled as the huge community centre, multipurpose area which was super cool to see, and finally Moomins! Moomins are a Finnish character which are big in the country, they are kinda like the Finnish Mickey Mouse I gauged and we were able to actually meet a Moomin and of course I brought some merchandise.
Anyways, thanks for reading as always. I am looking forward to my last full week working here in Stockholm although I am beginning to face the fact that I will be leaving very soon.