Motivation, Soft Skills and Conversations

Welcome to this week’s Remote Work Newsletter! Each week we drop a remote work tip video, a work-from-anywhere insight, and a recommendation to discover more about remote work.

Remote Work Tip Video: How to Spark Intrinsic Motivation

Video Length: 92 Seconds

When you work remotely, you are very often working when no one is looking. To do that well, you need a good amount of intrinsic motivation. In this week's video, we look at a simple trick that can help you gain the extra intrinsic motivation you need to keep going when the boss isn't watching.

Work From Anywhere Insight

73% of Americans believe they are a better-than-average driver. Of course, that 73% cannot all be correct.

When we started BillionMinds, we were curious if people were similarly over-confident in their remote work skills. So we asked and got some very interesting answers.

As you might expect, we found a similar pattern - a distinct majority of employees rated their remote work skills as above average. Now, of course, that may be true - by definition a high proportion of our audience considers soft skills such as remote work skills to be important and so may spend more time working on them.

But things got very interesting when we took an extra step - empirically measuring those skills. We found that the MORE confident our users were in their remote work skills, the less well developed those skills were! This is almost certainly because of the Dunning-Kruger effect - a cognitive bias which leads people with low skill levels in a particular area to overestimate those skills.

No humans are immune to cognitive bias, so if you think that your remote work skills are above average, it might be time to check and see if that is true.

Recommendation

If you don't work remotely yet but would like to, how should you talk to your manager about it? We spoke to managers and employees about what works and what doesn't. You can get some valuable guidance on how to appraoch it in our latest blog post.