Hello everyone 😎
I am a first-year student at the Faculty of Economics in Bihać. In the second semester I got a new course Basics of Management and my first assignment. The task is to do an interview with a manager.
While reading the blogs on lonac.pro, I noticed the blogs of Senka Bajramović – community manager. 😊 I contacted Senka and did the first interview. The interview went better than I expected! I’ve been in lonac for so long and I’m glad I finally met the person behind this whole story. 🙂
Could you please introduce yourself first?
Uh, the hardest question at the beginning. 😁 I’m Senka Bajramović, I will be 30 this summer (hopefully not in lockdown). I studied communication at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo, where I also completed a master’s degree at the Department of Political Science – International Relations and Diplomacy. Since my student days, I have been volunteering and gaining various kinds of work experiences. I have spent most of my time in the NGO sector, working with and for young people. I am a great idealist and I think that everyone in their micro-environments, by doing what we are best at, can make significant changes. I love positive stories that celebrate someone’s success and I look forward to every, even the smallest step, on the way to a better environment for the life of young people, but also all of us in BiH. The Mozaik Foundation and the daily opportunity to help and empower young people (including us who work here) through the lonac.pro community was therefore a great choice for developing my career in that direction.
What is your current work position?
I work as a Community Manager at the Mozaik Foundation. I came to Mozaik as an intern, and then returned when the position for my dream job was open. The online community I am moderating is lonac.pro – a regional community for social activism and entrepreneurship, which I have been working on since its inception, for over 3 years now. You can see how we remembered the establishment of the lonac. I have been working in this position since July 2019. Speaking of the internship at Mozaik, a great opportunity is currently open – an internship in the Financial and Administrative Department of the Mozaik Foundation. Check it out! 👀
Can you briefly present the work of the Mozaik Foundation?
The Mozaik Foundation has existed for almost 20 years and is one of the most innovative non-profit social enterprises in our region. Our concept of development of Bosnia and Herzegovina is based on strengthening entrepreneurship, and primarily social entrepreneurship of young people. Mozaik’s mission is to recognize, empower and invest in socially responsible young people, so that they become role models for their peers. We carry out our mission through three strongly connected programs – we recognize young people through the regional community lonac.pro, we empower them through Youth Banks, and we invest in them through the Startup studio.
How was the lonac.pro community established?
As I said, Mozaik has been working with young people for almost 20 years and knows their needs, interests and desires very well. Through the Youth Bank, we met young people all over BiH, from the smallest places to urban areas, so Mozaik already had a huge offline community of young people, ready to do something good for their communities and beyond. Through lonac.pro we wanted to gather all the collectively built opportunities (therefore, we are very aware that good opportunities for young people in BiH and beyond are not created only by Mozaik), needed by young people for professional growth and development. The idea is that a young person, in any corner of BiH (or region) who wants to do something good, finds in lonac what he/she needs – an answer, advice, investment, grant, associates, mentors, support and encouragement to do what he/she intended. Our primary target group – young people aged 17 to 35 who want to learn, work and develop their entrepreneurial skills, while on the other hand, based on their needs, we include those who want and can “push” them on the road to success – mentors, investors, NGOs, public and private sector, academic communities, donors, individuals. There are 160 of them right now! This is how it was created, and it is still growing, developing and taking on dimensions that surprise us as well. ❤ When there are people who work with the intention to help and “contribute” to the positive in the sea of negative around us, great connections and stories are created without our interference.
What does a day of a Community Manager look like?
Community Manager is definitely one of the professions that have existed for only a few years in our area and is most often associated with marketing and social networks. There is a broad definition of position, and in my case, it primarily refers to moderating the online community – lonac. It is always alive, it works 24/7, so there is a saying – online communities do not sleep, just like Community Managers. 😊 Although the position involves a lot of planning, content design and campaigns, it is also very unpredictable because you have to react very quickly and respond to various inquiries, comments, interactions… Although a common phrase in the description of some jobs, no CM working day is really the same and that is one of the greatest advantages. You listen to the needs of the community (now it is a large community of almost 50,000 registered members!), constantly test what interests them and what can be even better, work on improving their user experience, try to include as many as possible who will push good ideas of young people, but also come up with innovative ways to get those opportunities to them. Follow analytics: count sessions, write newsletters, moderate FB group, create content, share it through different channels, connect people, communicate with them on every possible channel… and at the end of the day you are happiest when someone gives you the opportunity to do internship, applies for a job, start their own business, improve their business, meet a mentor who changes their lives, etc. I think it is enough to look at just a brief retrospective of our activities last year, to get a picture of what we are doing: Retrospective 2020 in lonac.
Is it just you or do you have a team that you manage?
Thanks for thinking I could moderate a community of almost 50,000 people on my own! 😄 But first, the entire Mozaik Foundation stands behind our community. They are all in different ways parts of a great mechanism that we run together and integrate everything they do every day into lonac in order to reach as many young people as possible as potential support and help. However, as I mentioned, there are other Mozaik programs, which are very complex. We call our team lonac timić, because at the moment only the three of us are working, at full time. We will soon expand the team with new interns who will certainly be a great help to us. It may be interesting to mention that the three of us have never seen each other live before! 😱😩 Colleague Emilija Seočanac is in Belgrade and she is our Regional Coordinator for the development of the online community who tries to offer good ideas and the whole story about lonac, which has already rooted in BiH, as a resource to young people in Serbia and potential partners they can respond to their needs. Emili joined us exactly a year ago, when the whole coronavirus situation began, so we haven’t had a chance to meet yet. But with our way of working and perfect online communication, I think we are more productive and coordinated than many teams sitting together in the office all day. Elvedina Omerhodžić is also a member of our team. She is the Social Media Coordinator, who strives to show all the content we have in lonac, in a timely manner and adapted to the target group we are addressing, on our social networks. She is also the owner of the trade DStone, so her experiences as a young entrepreneur are very useful for us to understand our members. In lonac, you can also find out your working style, so Emili and I, who are very I + E (integrator + enterpreneur), Ela with her P + A (producer + administrator) fit in perfectly. And that is very important for the functioning of the team, to get to know ourselves, and only then to see others and how we fit in with each other. More about this interesting test: Find out your teamwork style for free in lonac.
Although we didn’t meet live, we tried to have one photo together 😁😁😁
At a very young age, you got the opportunity to lead a team and be in a managerial position. Was that a problem for you at work?
I have to admit it really isn’t, so far. Maybe I was just lucky enough to work in a primarily healthy work environment where colleagues are valued for their collegiality, productivity, good ideas and attitude towards the work they do, and not for age, gender or anything else. Years of experience are of course important and must be appreciated, but I think young people who have the necessary skills for managerial positions deserve to be given opportunities and justify trust. I am glad that the director of the Mozaik Foundation recognized that in me and gave me the opportunity to develop professionally, certainly learning from all of them. There are rare opportunities in one company to go through positions from intern to manager in such a short time. And my team is very young, all of us are under 30, we function in a similar way, we share the same values and attitudes, we have the same responsibility for the work we do and I think it all contributes to being a successful team, that is – they make my work easier. 😊
You mentioned that you communicate a lot online and that you haven’t even met your colleague from Belgrade. How do you organize your work online?
Our organization is constantly striving to keep up with the current trends and keep track of the most innovative tools to work with. Now there are almost 40 of us, and for a year now almost the entire team has been working from home. During the last year, we invested a lot of time in finding ways to work efficiently and productively online as well (and it seems to me now even more than before). That attitude of the management towards the work also contributed to organizing of our team. We communicate on a daily basis, use digital tools to organize teams and projects (e.g., asana), adhere to the standards introduced in our daily work so as not to make it difficult for other colleagues to find information in a timely manner and constantly communicate and report the most important information. Basically, I would say that the biggest key is constant communication that contributes to making us feel part of the team online as well. I would be lying if I said that it is not demanding, that it does not take up more time, but it is definitely important, as can be seen from our results that we measure. The challenges of online work are more related to the current conditions and the establishment of a balance between private and business. It is very easy to fall into the trap that the job extends to the whole day, especially in this and similar positions. With us, work never ends, individual tasks, but always, very easily, we can only move on to a new one. It is important to celebrate successes, constantly look behind you – what we have done and follow the progress towards the set goal.
What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses? What characteristics do you think are most needed for your work position?
OK, you leave the most difficult questions for last? 😂 I think that honesty, empathy, perfectionism and humor are my greatest virtues, of course, even professionally. So, I communicate both internally and externally and fortunately the community I moderate is based on equal values, so it wasn’t hard for me to fit in. I always try to find something positive and prefer to experience every problem as a challenge that I will solve. As for the flaws, I would say that I am still finding ways to learn to focus better on important tasks in such a dynamic position and to solve one big problem in the long run, rather than maybe five smaller ones, that could have waited. I certainly hope that the experience will contribute to a better prioritization of both my and the tasks I pass on to the team. I would also say that I am impatient, which sometimes leads me to situations where I would do everything right away, which of course is not possible in this business.
What do you think is the most desirable skill of a manager?
Well, certainly the biggest question is there – what does that manager want in the end and what kind of team does he/she lead? The most desirable skills of a manager who wants to be a leader of his/her team and not only strict authority are definitely respecting the opinions of his/her team, making important decisions together and enabling them to do what they love and are best at, each of them. Certainly, a manager cannot demand a certain work style, standards and attitude towards work without doing it himself/herself. I think that the position itself should not define our relationship and that a manager can be both a friend and someone with whom you joke, share private problems and ask for private advice. But that is possible only if both sides are fair and at no time do they abuse the friendship or allow the business not to be finished because of it. I think it is certainly a good organization – an overview of the whole process in a way that sees its beginning and end and where who and how fits into it. In my opinion, a good manager is a manager who is involved, not someone who will delegate tasks and take credit in the end for the work done.
Thank you Senka for the great answers. I hope you enjoyed reading the interview, just like I did. 😎 If you have any questions for Senka related to the work of lonac or her team, please contact her. 🤗
