Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep56: Work less hours and get better results.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.meiping.com. This is Mei Ping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of My God of Ping, a careers podcast that you should listen to if you are serious about your corporate career. So today I actually have a very interesting topic I want to talk about

Starting point is 00:00:41 and this was basically inspired by a poll on LinkedIn where the question is really this should young people work on weekends because the general connotation is that hey if you are young and you don't know much then maybe you should spend more time, particularly on weekends, trying to do more work, right? Investing more time in, I guess, your day-to-day deliverables. So today I want to talk about that a little bit. And this article is generally quite interesting because my career insight was featured by the LinkedIn News team. And my opinion is this, right? I think that

Starting point is 00:01:26 there is a way, and I think there are various methods for you to achieve the same result, if not achieve better results, but spending less time. But the secret is really this, right? Spending focused time. So it is not saying that, you know, you don't want to work on weekends or you want to work on weekends. At the end of the day, it's your personal decision, depending on, I guess, how fast you want to accelerate your career.

Starting point is 00:01:59 However, just a quick reminder for all of you young professionals out there, it's very easy to get started in your new job. And luckily, this is maybe your first job, right? You are motivated, you are enthusiastic. There's just so much that you want to do. And coupled with the whole personal branding, visibility story, storyline that you hear on social media a lot, I think there is a lot of pressure for young professionals to want to quickly prove themselves right want to be able to

Starting point is 00:02:30 speak up and like take on more work and i try to demonstrate that they could do a lot the key consideration point now is this right is it better to take on more work that you eventually cannot deliver or actually try to focus on the scope and roles and responsibilities that you're pretty much hired to do in the first place and making sure that you do those well first before you go and volunteer for new work? So I can share with you guys a really quick story. So I have a client who is a who is in a management trainees of program so he has been working for about a year or so and he has also fallen into this i need to volunteer for more work um idea where he's spending all his weekends working he is spending a lot of time working but But the challenge is this, right? He is actually not achieving more.

Starting point is 00:03:27 In fact, it has gotten downhill because he ends up volunteering for work, even though he couldn't finish his original scope. Right. So the point I'm trying to make here is this, right? It is a good mindset and good attitude of wanting to show that you're enthusiastic and motivated. However, if you are breaching some sort of boundary and consistently giving 200%, 300%, there will be a point where you will burn out.

Starting point is 00:03:59 And like I always tell my clients, your career is like a marathon. It's not exactly a sprint. So the faster you try to push through in the first i don't know one or two years because at the time you're still fairly enthusiastic then guess what right it you try to move up so quickly eventually like you might crash so balance is important and i think i guess i'm not saying that you shouldn't put in the effort but if you if you do want to put in the effort make sure that it is targeted and you have a really clear idea of like

Starting point is 00:04:31 what you are trying to do so that you could really achieve more not putting in the effort hoping that you will achieve more and you spend so much time eventually your boss may not still be very happy with the quality of your work. Okay, so let me share with you maybe three quick ideas on how you can achieve more by, I guess, working less at work. So number one, number one actually is understanding different communication styles. And the reason why this is really important is because if you cannot understand or fully resonate with the way that your boss, your colleague or your stakeholder is communicating in terms of the intention of what they actually want in the piece of work, what will happen is that you will spend a lot of time trying to do what you think they want, but not exactly what they actually want. So you may find that after putting in a lot of effort, right after you when you finally deliver that piece of work, it is not exactly to the to the standards or expectation.

Starting point is 00:05:34 And you may end up having to redo the entire piece of work. So this actually is a lot of time, energy. And of course, it is also very demotivating. So. Clarify So clarify, clarify, clarify, practice good listening skills, practice good clarification skills, paraphrasing skills so that you can really understand the intention of the work that is being communicated so that you can actually focus on it and if you choose to want to work on weekend, can feel free to do so the second tip

Starting point is 00:06:05 is this right a lot of i noticed that a lot of young professionals sometimes like they couldn't really jump into the job so quickly or they kind of like require a lot of time to i guess adapt it's because they lack industry knowledge so industry knowledge or best practices is not exactly something that you will learn in the university and if you're just waiting for your boss to teach you that or to only pick that up during your i guess nine to five working hours it might be a little bit slow in terms of progress when nowadays in the pandemic a lot of a lot of work just like keeps coming in right so what you can do is maybe to invest a couple of hours um maybe after work or even on weekends so that you can you know just just read up go on google go on like different industry

Starting point is 00:06:52 platforms industry portals just read up a little bit more on the industry terminologies right the latest news the latest updates this is really critical so that when you are at work when you hear your bosses your stakeholder stakeholders, and your colleagues mention certain industry-specific terminologies, you understand that very quickly. Otherwise, what will happen is that you will be lost. And when you feel lost, there is a lot of anxiety that comes with it. And of course, if you feel anxiety, you're feeling lost,

Starting point is 00:07:22 it's likely that you will not take any action because you are so confused to begin with. So you can actually accelerate your learning by spending some extra bit of time just improving some of your industry knowledge, some best practices that you can pretty much pick up online and you don't have to wait to working hours to be able to do that. So the third tip is this right, the third tip I think is really critical for you to identify any skills gaps that you may have. So when I say skills gap, it could mean gaps in technical skills that's actually required to deliver your day-to-day roles and responsibilities as well as maybe gaps in terms of like soft skills. So I can give you a quick example. Maybe your role requires you to work

Starting point is 00:08:07 with different kind of stakeholders, right? And to work with different kind of stakeholders, maybe in a project capacity, you kind of need to be a fairly organized person. But what if organizational skills is not something that you're actually really good at? Then if you really want to spend time learning and improving a skill then maybe choose that one skill to work on so normally my

Starting point is 00:08:33 two-week trainings i actually go through a very detailed um skills gap assessment process but this is something that you could also do on your own so just cover a little bit of time and really conduct a skills gap assessment on kind of like where you are in terms of like your technical and soft skills, which are the ones that you're not that good at. And basically, those are the ones that you need to improve first. So nowadays, when I talk to a lot of young professionals, learning nowadays is a very, very cool thing. Everybody's like publishing all their certifications and so forth online. But learning that really allows you to be productive, efficient, effective, and really achieve the final results, to me, that is real learning.

Starting point is 00:09:20 The rest of the stuff, right, in my view, is hobby. It's a hobby because it does not actually help you in your corporate job i mean it's fun right to learn spanish or whatever but if you want to do targeted learning then make sure that it actually specifically addresses a certain point that is able to help you move forward in your career right help you accelerate that so a couple of things that um you could focus on depending on i guess kind of where you are in your career number one could be industry knowledge as i mentioned um number two it could be some technical skills that you will require different um tools softwares whatever that is and thirdly and never forget

Starting point is 00:10:01 soft skills because soft skills is the foundation even if you don't really know how to do your job, if you can't communicate that and try to ask for more time and provide updates on a timely basis, all those other soft skills related stuff, then it's probably going to be even more challenging. So the point in this very short episode is just to challenge you guys to think about, you know, what learning actually is and is it truly necessary to be spending a lot of hours if you are not really getting the results and achieving more? Because if that is not happening, what that means is that you need a change in strategy. So we don't keep going down a path that we know will lead nowhere right so that is basically the the main point that i want to share um today and thank you so much to the linkedin news team for featuring my career insights on whether young

Starting point is 00:10:54 people should be working weekends and i think my answer here is quite a is a fairly clear no but if you're doing targeted learning then I highly encourage it because you will be able to accelerate your career massively if only if only if you are doing targeted and very specific learning. So with that, I wish you guys all the best. And I'll see you next week. Bye.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep56: Work less hours and get better results.

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