We asked Ivona how she would describe the role of the Community manager, for those who are not familiar with this position, and how this role might have helped her in her personal growth.
She answered us honestly that Community management is a term that she also encountered for the first time when she applied for the position. Considering that this position is relatively new in our region and that still a small number of companies in their structure have a need for a Community manager, a list of tasks was created when she came, which the founder of tershouse, Nermin, and Ivona were working on and according to needs, expanded. But in short, we could say that the Community manager is actually a person who takes care of everything that has to do with the space and the people who live in it. This includes the slightly more boring side of work such as administration, contracts, invoices, but also creative tasks such as social networks, writing texts for blogs, designing internal events, assisting and organizing external events, leading yoga classes for our coworkers, hosting podcasts and much more.
When asked how this role helped her in her personal growth, she answers: "A lot, because this role widens your horizons; you come into contact with people with whom you might never find yourself in the same room or enter into a dialogue because at first you think you have no common topics. You also become mentally more flexible in the sense that you learn to multitask, develop soft skills, especially communication skills and everything else that comes with jobs that bring daily contact with people."
We continued the conversation about the favorite things about this position, which are according to her opinion that she met people she probably wouldn't have in a private "arrangement" and made new friends. She also states that at tershouse you can meet digital nomads from all over the world who travel around the region, start-up founders, artists, lawyers; so, in short, people of different ages, from different professional milieus, views of the world, etc. Ivona also says that "all this affects the expansion of your own horizons, you often hear stories along the way in the kitchen that become 'food for thought' and then you realize that you want to try something new , go to some new place that you happened to hear about, find out about some super cool documentary that doesn't belong to your usual sphere of interest and then accidentally at the age of 33 you discover a passion for some things that you didn't know existed until yesterday."
What we all know about Ivona is that she is a big fsn of yoga, which she has been practicing for many years. We asked her what are the biggest benefits of such a lifestyle?
"Everyone can from any spiritual and physical discipline such as yoga 'take' what suits them; some see yoga exclusively as a tool for strengthening the body, some learn to breathe properly through yoga, and some calm the mind and learn to connect with themselves. Yoga definitely helped me in all these segments and this is what I try to teach our coworkers who attend my yoga classes here at tershouse. Yoga is an incredibly powerful tool for overall health," she said.
And not to talk only about the advantages, we also asked her what the biggest challenges are in community management. Ivona believes that it is definitely the attempt to please as many people as possible and to find a common language with all coworkers, and we are all quite different and have different needs and expectations. In addition, she mentions the challenge of regularly offering innovative and interesting content in the format of internal events that people will actually come to. Another challenge that this position brings is the exposure in the sense that the position is such that even when you have a bad day, you can't really isolate yourself from people, and sometimes it turns out that it's better that way because some casual joke ‘fix’ you.
Given that Ivona is a person who always tries to learn and improve herself, she is currently in the process of training to become a gestalt psychotherapist. That's why we asked her how she uses her knowledge in this field to create community in the coworking space. Ivona believes that in tershouse, as in any larger collective, there are coworkers who are a little more withdrawn (introverted) and those who lean more towards extroversion and openness. ‘Finding a common language for both polarities is something in which my knowledge of psychology helped me, but also situations in which you need to address your coworkers about something, relatively speaking, unpleasant or when you find yourself in a situation where you need to 'draw' someone's attention in relation something.’
Since the essence of a coworking space is that everyone feels productive and that they are in the right place to work, we asked Ivona what is the best way to deal with the demands of a large number of people, considering different industries, origins and working styles in the community. However, Ivona believes that the demands of coworkers mostly have nothing to do with the industry they are from, but with personal needs and expectations. ‘At tershouse, we try to please everyone, which can really be a challenge. Direct and open communication is important to us, and this is what we work on a lot, because that's the only way everyone's request can be fulfilled.’
And finally, what does Ivona do when she is not a Community Manager? Considering that Community management is such that you are constantly surrounded by people and there is a lot of talking, Ivona always tries to recharge her batteries by ‘changing’ the company of people in her spare time for the company of her friends, reading, going to nature as much as possible. Doing yoga and going to the gym is part of her mental and physical hygiene.
