At The Jolt, we specialize in battle-tested career advice for the real-world, from real-world executives who've done it and bought the t-shirt. Sign-up for our career email by pasting thejolt.substack.com into your browser, and you'll get our free email every 2 weeks. We don't sell your info, we don't spam and we only send an email once every two weeks. Nobody needs more email.
But we do help your career with top-level, insider advice that you won't ever get from your boss or HR. We're like a career coach in your pocket. Nothing is theory.
Every edition of The Jolt contains a Wink, a Nudge and a Jolt, all geared to increasingly move you into action on critical career topics, and all designed to drive 5 Core Super Skills every persons needs in their hopper. We're nice like that.
In our latest edition below, we're giving a free career plan on how to navigate the change to the place we used to call?work. Granted, not all of us had a place of work, wanted one or even needed one, but for most of us, that place will never be the same again.
So read on. It’ll help when HR announce your relocation to the Moon.
The vote is in: 32% of us want to work from home forever, but 23% of us want to work in an office forever. Nearly half of us though, are a bit in the middle; we want some form of hybrid. New news? Not really, but now you know where the world is permanently going, you can cut your career key with more teeth. The Wink? You need to set yourself up for success in a hybrid world, whether you are hybrid or not.
The data above doesn't lie. Your instinct doesn’t lie. How we work has changed for good. Every company is tackling a beast of a balance between the needs of their people with the economic reality of the bricks, chairs and meeting rooms they invested in. Most of us are already in some form of re-birthing of our working week. The last two years have given us insight into what working from home is really like. It’s been a revelation and domestic whip-slap all at the same time. While the whole concept of hybrid working might feel like old news, absorbing it into your career psyche isn’t - it’s a must.?
Our thesis? The working week we once knew is taking its final breaths. You need a plan to keep your career accelerating while the world dances in its new work clothes.
As your company starts to roll out and adapt to its new working practices, below are a set of Jolt battle-tips to help you assess and navigate them. This isn’t about discovering your Zoom back-ground was reflecting your collection of porcelain cats in the mirror. That’s so 2019. It’s about understanding the economic and human context of this new world - and how you stay one step ahead.
Super Skill:?Purpose, Relationships, Doing, Story-Telling & Resilience. Bam!
The only good time to put a plan in place for all of this is now.
- Embrace The Tech.?Technology has made remote work much easier, but it’s also created a web of digital noise & confusion. Work is going to get scrappier, more geographically dispersed and more dependent on fast, digital decision making. The technology you use now is going to look old-school in a year. That isn't an excuse for not figuring out how to use it - and how to make it work for you now. At a base line, don’t be the person who can’t mute the audio causing the echo from the depths of hell, or not know how to share multiple screens. It’ll date you. Instead, play with the magic and learn. Ask others for tips. Google the hacks. It’s amazing how simple tricks can raise our game. For example, one of our Jolters uses two screens to present on Zoom. One for the camera to maintain eye contact, one for the presentation itself. To them it feels more like real life, and to their audience, it feels far more human. Small trick, better outcome. And if you don’t have super-fast Wifi yet, install it. Part of your new career-brand is your ability to handle and use technology to drive better outputs. We all know how frustrating it is to be on the receiving end of a crappy connection.
- Over-Invest In Relationships.?Your wifi connection is not the only connection that has an impact on your career.?Building relationships over phone and video works. We’ve proven it. It makes IRL meetings with that person even more pronounced when we finally meet. But don’t assume your connections with key peers or bosses will stay strong by themselves. Face-to-face will never be usurped as our primary method of creating trust and confidence in others. Make time for coffee. Prioritize lunch. Be the one who steps away from packing every thought into an email and hitting send. If your company is going back to a hybrid environment, get on calendars with people in advance - there’s going to be less time for casual drive-by’s. If you’ve already gone fully remote, plan time for face-to-face connections whenever you can. The key is to plan, otherwise it’ll be summer before you know it, and you don’t want to have become the tiny camera square in the corner of someone’s laptop.
- Set Boundaries.?We’re noticing a lot more weekend work taking place amongst our team. Sunday afternoons have become a new Monday morning. We’ve kinda let that happen and we need to correct it. Emails that used to arrive late in the evening that we thought could wait until the next day, don’t feel like they can wait anymore. As the idea of a weekend demilitarized-zone wanes, the idea of time itself and what is work and not work, has changed too. More organizations who stick to & enforce the principles of boundaries might emerge, but regardless, you need to know what your boundaries are. If you don’t set them, they’ll be set for you. Think about what that means to you, and write them down. If you’re in a position to create boundaries or influence them, do that now. It doesn't need to be a one size fits all. Make it personal. Make it work for you, for others, your boss. For the last two years we’ve proven we can navigate it.
- Be A Productivity Ninja.?The economic reality of concrete means your organization may be grappling with a size-able amount of office space and empty chairs. It’s called overhead, and it’s going to impact a lot of the financial decisions of your organization in 2022 and beyond - from pay rises, to promotions, hiring and firing. It’s likely most companies have realized that they simply don’t need as much as they did before we all went Covid-crazy. This may not mean shuttering offices and lay-off’s, but it will mean ensuring companies have the right people in the right roles. The microscope on performance is going to get even stronger in a hybrid world. Presenteeism is dead - people can’t show up to clock in at meetings like they used to. So how do you best handle it??Productivity. The upside of our new hybrid working world is that our work from home productivity appears to have taken a big tick up. Ride the wave. Position yourself as the radically-productive hybrid super-star who can lead the way. Be the person who uses technology, data & insights to move things fast. Be the person who communicates well in person and digitally. Be the person who reaches through the screen but still understands the mechanics of getting things done in real life.
- Be Nice To Yourself.?Finally, don’t get despondent in this new sea, especially if technology gives you the digital shivers or turning hybrid feels like you’ve just been handed the worst of both your worlds. Just because the canvas has been flipped and the tools are different, we still have human eyes, ears and emotions. We all know how to learn new tricks, even if you’re an old dog. Embrace it! If you’re a long time reader of The Jolt, you’ll know we like to dish some Zen now and then. Hold true to what got you to where you are - your purpose. And if you don’t have a purpose, make sure you find one. This new working world is just another ocean with different weather for you to sail, and its much more fun if you’re enjoying the waves.
Finally, a closing bonus Wink; don’t say you work remotely. You’re not distant. Say you work connected.?
