This is the power that more and more employees realize they have. To hire you as an employer and to fire you when you no longer fit their needs. If that bothers you, if that offends your sense of loyalty to the workplace, do me a favor. Go to Google News and search for “layoff”. Do a little light browsing and tell me what loyalty has to do with anything.
In the first case, most organizations I’ve seen only offer some leadership or management training after someone becomes a manager. This is wrong. This is gatekeeping for no reason. There are people on your teams right now who are not managers, but would like to be, and you’re doing nothing to prepare them for that. Someone gets promoted and then you start them on a training program on how to be a manager. That doesn’t make sense. What are they supposed to do on day one with the team that now reports to them?
There are also people on your team with fantastic leadership qualities who might not want to be a manager, or where there’s no opportunity to become a manager. Why wouldn’t we want to support them in becoming better leaders even if their title doesn’t immediately make us think they are one?
Unfortunately, I do believe we are taught the opposite of this. We are expected to work harder and harder and then use our time off to rest so that we can go back and do it some more. It’s all focused on being a good worker, but this study seems to indicate that we are all better off focusing on other parts of our lives during the time we spend away from work. Maybe, just maybe, we are more than our jobs. Maybe when we spend the energy and focus on other parts of our lives enough to plan them out and be intentional about them, we’re happier.
What a concept.
This one is a little harder for me because letting people know what I’ve been up to sounds an awful lot like self-promotion. I’ve never been super comfortable with people who are constantly promoting themselves and what they do. I certainly don’t want to become known for promoting myself all the time. The difference between the two was actually the subject of two episodes of the Work-Life Podcast earlier this year, and I thought the discussion between Wayne Turmel and Marisa Eikenberry was a fantastic exploration of the difference between being ethically visible (I stole the term from them, it’s that good!)
In other words, it’s successful when the organization puts together and supports an intentional mentorship program. When they don’t they become reliant on chance interactions in the office. That’s the difference. It’s not that hybrid and remote employees just can’t be trained and mentored. It’s that quality mentoring requires intention.
If you want to provide quality mentorship for your junior employees create and support a program to do that. Period. End of discussion. Where they are located is not relevant.
As I said, it’s not that being a remote worker means we won’t have any friends. We just have to be more intentional about it. We have to find ways to interact socially with our current friends and be in spaces, physical and virtual, where we can meet new people.
You’ll read plenty of hot takes about remote work. Whether it be how difficult it is to build any culture or connect with your team, you’ll get lonely, you won’t get promoted, or mentored, etc. It’s not that the authors of these posts are lying to you, but they are also unlikely to point out that none of these things have to be the way they are. They can all be overcome when someone decides to act with intention.