Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep60: Work from home. How to stay visible?

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.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of my Gotta Ping podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you are serious about growing your corporate career. So today I want to talk about a topic that I think has been on a lot of people's mind. And that is really around,

Starting point is 00:00:46 how can you still get visible and stand out when you are working from home? So either you're working from home or some kind of remote working arrangement with your team. One of the challenges that working professionals face is, how do I make sure that my boss or my team members recognize that I'm working and that they don't think that I'm slacking off, right? And they don't think that I'm being lazy. So I think that's really one of the concerns, because if you do not come across as somebody who is contributing

Starting point is 00:01:17 when you're working from home or working remotely, it could potentially affect your chances for a promotion, a good performance rating, or basically, you know, your overall professional reputation as somebody who could continue to to recognize that it does not have to negatively impact your career. So working from home or remote working on its own, you know, it's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think recently people have been reacting to it a little bit more negatively because of the pandemic. Initially, everybody thought that this whole work from home thing is just going to be temporary. But I think right now, reality is really starting to sink in that, hey, this could be a long term thing. And I'm afraid

Starting point is 00:02:18 because I don't know how to deal with this. So today, let me give you guys a very quick perspective. So if it's something that you don't know how to deal with, you can always learn and upskill on how you can do better. However, it's really important for you to also recognize where is this fear coming from? Because I think a lot of people, when they don't know how to do something, they will immediately label it as bad instead of actually finding some solutions on how that could you know some solutions that could really resolve their problem right okay so the other thing also i want really wanted to share is that remote working is not really as new as you think like the concept of remote working has been here for a really long time and you know working from home as well so depending on how ambitious you are and for those of you who may be in working in regional or global teams in fact remote working

Starting point is 00:03:13 has been the norm and it has been the norm for a really really long time and if people could you know if people could deal with it in organizations before I am very sure that even during the pandemic right now, there's just a lot that we can do to adapt. And I think really the biggest challenge is around the mindset of embracing that, hey, working from home and remote working is here to stay. And instead of like, you know, fearing it

Starting point is 00:03:38 and being really stressed out that it might affect my career, why not important? Why not not you know actually focus on upskilling the core skills are required that will really help you get visible and stand out even though you're working from home all right so now let me share with you right two i think very very important tips that you really need to um rather tips or skills that you really need to improve on if you really want to continue to stand out when working from home the first skill is actually this is really developing clear and concise communication skills so in the past when you're in the office communication skills might

Starting point is 00:04:22 not really you know if you have poor communication skills it might not be that obvious because you can always pop by your bosses or your colleagues and just you know try to solve your problems um you know ad hoc or pop by as many times as you want during the day and with that right any poor communication skills maybe it doesn't come across that obvious. But when you're working from home, right, communication is going to be quite limited because there's just limited face time. Or even if you want to have, I guess, face video conferencing, you need to schedule it. And then most of conversations probably happen on the phone or doing over messaging apps. So with that, right, your bad habit of potentially communicating in a circle,

Starting point is 00:05:08 like messy communication, that is actually going to create a lot of frustration and will also make you come across as somebody who may not know what you're talking about. So that might not be true because you might know what you're talking about, right? But because you don't really have clear communication skills, it doesn't come across to your boss or to your colleagues or your stakeholders. And that actually creates a negative impression of your overall value as a

Starting point is 00:05:34 professional. So that's something that could be dangerous because it does affect your professional reputation. So you really need to, you know focus on developing really clear and clear communication skills so that more people can understand you and actually this is one thing that i do cover in my two-week boost your confidence and soft skills at work training and the reason why i actually go through communication in so much detail in my training is because communication is a really really big issue at the workplace and unfortunately a lot of people don't recognize it. And I think with the whole working from home arrangement, it's becoming more obvious that how poor communication can actually impact your ability to stand out.

Starting point is 00:06:15 And even if you are taking that step to stand out, right? Because if you don't have good communication skills, your reputation is probably not going to see much improvement even though you are actually stepping up. So I think it's really important to build on the skill. And I think for those of you who are a little bit afraid to step up, just try to stand out or try to do a little bit more to, I guess, get attention and get visible. What I would suggest is that you could actually start by something really small. So if you feel that, okay, video communication or phone communication with my boss or my colleagues is a little bit daunting, maybe you can start by sending clearer emails or like sending clearer

Starting point is 00:07:01 messages, but just making sure that your messages, you know, are delivered across. And why I say communication is so important is because if, you know, you're somebody who's really shy, you're really afraid to stand out and then you finally decided to send that message, but your communication is in a circle,

Starting point is 00:07:20 then actually it will demotivate you from wanting to communicate further with your bosses. So that is a bit of a problem. So you want to fix the fundamental issue, which is, of course, strong communication skills. So second tip, actually, that's also really, really important, is to make sure that you are aligning priorities and expectations with your boss. So this is something I think a lot of people don't pay attention to, but something so, so, so critical. Because again, if you're not at the office, your boss can't just pop by your

Starting point is 00:07:50 desk and you can't just randomly pop by your boss's desk anymore. So trying to catch your boss on priorities and get advice is not going to be as simple as when you're in the office. So what you need to do is to make sure that you are consistently having catch-up sessions with your boss to really understand, hey, is this priority still the right priority? And if I'm going in the right direction. So catching up with bosses and how to go about catching up with bosses

Starting point is 00:08:19 is really something that I really teach my one-on-one clients and also during training. And I think this is really an important component because if you don't align priorities and expectations with your boss on what you need to deliver what will happen is that you'll spend many many hours work from home affecting your work-life balance trying to deliver something to your boss that may not be the main priority and may not be the most important thing so this is something that is really frustrating if you find yourself getting caught in that situation so you want to make sure that you don't get yourself caught in this hamster wheel that can that not could but will will

Starting point is 00:08:56 definitely affect your work-life balance and potentially your mental health as well so priority management and priority alignment with your boss is definitely one of those skills that you need to develop in terms of like you know providing the right progress updates being able to identify what are the key priorities and making sure that your boss also agrees with the same i think that is a process and that is a there is a way to continuously manage your boss's expectations so that both of you are moving in the same direction and this is becoming even more important particularly you know from a work in a work for work from home sort of arrangement where you may not be seeing your boss or your

Starting point is 00:09:37 colleagues or your project stakeholder on a you know day-to-day basis so those are basically like two key important skills that I think you need to develop or rather two important things that I think you need to do if you really want to get visible and stand out. So lastly, right, I just want to remind you guys that getting visible, right,

Starting point is 00:09:56 does not mean that you need to make a big presentation. It doesn't mean that, you know, you need to be calling your boss like 10 times a day. That is not a good way to get visible. And I that you know as a former corporate leader because i in the past you know i do have team members located in different parts of the world and i also work with stakeholders from 43 countries in fact the best people that i really enjoy working with are the people who consistently give me updates and we always have like proper catch-up sessions to align our expectations and the people that i really dislike working with are those people that I

Starting point is 00:10:29 consistently have to chase them, and they end up doing something that is not agreed with me, or they end up assuming what I wanted, which was actually not what I wanted, or rather not what the project had agreed on, but they decided to do whatever that they wanted to do. So these problems that I've just shared with you are really, really common in the corporate world. And again, it actually boils down to two fundamental problems and skills, skills gap for them. So the two skills, again, as I shared in this episode

Starting point is 00:10:57 is number one, clear communication. And number two is alignment of priorities and expectation. It actually really boils down to these two significant problems. Okay, so with that, I actually end this episode with this question. Basically, my question is this, what are you doing?

Starting point is 00:11:15 What are the baby steps you're taking today to stand out and get visible when you're working from home or you are in some sort of remote working arrangement? So with that, I'll leave you guys in this episode to really ponder on what are you doing to make sure that you get recognized so that it can positively impact your career and help you advance in your corporate career and not create problems for you. So with that, I'll see you guys in the next episode.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep60: Work from home. How to stay visible?

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