Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash
No matter where you live – or if your local COVID-19 cases are rising or falling – it clear that as a country we are going to be navigating this pandemic for months to come (if not longer). For many of us, that means that our employers are choosing to continue remote work, or some hybrid form of it, for the foreseeable future. For some, this is great news – we have thrived working in a remote environment. For others, this reality feels professionally paralyzing.
You could fall into the latter camp for several reasons. Maybe you are a working parent who is in the middle of the summer with no idea what is going to happen come fall and schools for your children. Maybe your manager has no experience or skill managing a remote workforce, and you have not felt supported or challenged since moving to remote work. Maybe your work load has exploded and you are suddenly unable to draw a line between “work life” and “home life”, since work and home are the same – and maybe you also feel that this is going completely unnoticed or recognized by your organization in a way that would lead to any support or promotion.
Maybe it is all of those things and more. If so, take a deep breath. Despite how it may feel day in and day out, you are not alone. And there are experts out there to help you navigate this and continue to grow your career while you do so. We have pulled together some of the best advice we have seen in the past few months to help you get through several different scenarios that you might be facing.
The Best Career Advice We’ve Found for Navigating COVID-19 (In Any Circumstance)
If you are ready for your next promotion:
If you are ready for your next promotion, but feeling stalled because of COVID-19 (or any reason, really), we recommend starting with this read: How To Get Promoted While Working Remotely, written for The Broadside newsletter by Kristen Gill. The Broadside is an incredible resource for career advancement sent to your inbox each month – you can subscribe here.
My favorite takeaways from this piece:
“Find a way to point out your successes on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual scale. If you have to, ask to schedule these check-ins formally on your boss’s calendar.”
On asking organizational leaders how the business goals or expectations may have changed due to COVID: “Doing the same could help you to demonstrate a previously unseen knack for working during a crisis or adapting to extreme circumstances.”
If you are interviewing for new jobs:
No matter the reason, if you are facing a job search right now and preparing to interview, we recommend this piece: How To Nail a Job Interview – Remotely by Amy Gallo for Harvard Business Review. It is full of practical and tactical tips to be prepared for everyone’s favorite activity: Interviewing for a job on a potentially finicky video platform.
My favorite takeaways from this piece:
Gallo reminds us about dressing professionally and testing technology ahead of time, of course, but she also focuses on emoting and displaying warmth during a remote interview, which most people won’t remember to focus on: “The crisis has made people more eager to connect with colleagues on an emotional level and your interviewer may have a higher expectation about how much warmth you convey during the interview … follow the lead of the interviewer on small talk, but it may be appropriate to ask the interviewer how they and their loved ones are doing right now. And you should have a good response prepared for the same question should it come back to you.”
If you want to expand your network:
We know, we know – everyone SHOULD be focused on network expansion, but many of us have given up on it during this time of social distancing. This piece, How to Network When There are No Networking Events by Alisa Cohn and Dorie Clark for HBR provides a blueprint for picking up where we left off before shutdowns began.
My favorite takeaways from this piece:
“Turn canceled conferences into private networking opportunities: Since the pandemic began, many conferences and other large gatherings have been canceled, but even in their absence, you can use them as a way to meet people. Take a look at the conferences scheduled for earlier in the year along with those that would have been coming up. Identify participants who were supposed to attend or speak or who came in prior years. (If you don’t have the list, you can often email conference organizers and ask for it.)”
If you are a working parent trying to (or being forced to) “do it all”:
This piece from Francesca Gino for HBR, Lessons from a Working Mom on “Doing It All” is a breath of fresh air when it comes to advice for managing life at home with kids and work during a pandemic. Gino begins the piece with a statement that all working parents need to read right now: “I’ve come to believe that the difference between going to bed feeling content or disappointed at the end of the day has a lot to do with the expectations we set for ourselves. Let’s lower our standards. Better yet: Let’s use this moment to shift them to something more reasonable.”
My favorite takeaways from this piece (of which there were many):
On focusing on happiness, rather than perfection, Gino says: “Instead of aiming for perfection, we need to aim for happiness. I remind myself that this is the goal every single day. I’m patient if it takes me longer than expected to get work done. And, at the dinner table every evening, I ask my little ones to talk about what made them happy and what they feel grateful for that day.”
If you need to prioritize yourself and start saying No:
Last but certainly not least, we want to remind you now more than ever how important it is to prioritize yourself and your goals – and to start saying “no” more often. Pop some popcorn and enjoy this webinar we did last month: The Power of NO (During COVID-19 and Beyond) for an honest, data-backed look at the imbalance of expectations on men and women when it comes to “stepping up” for mundane tasks that don’t contribute to career growth and promotion, and how we can start saying “no” to focus on the work that will bring us recognition and accolades – which we need now more than ever.
My favorite takeaways from this piece are:
While I’ll never actually watch this webinar (who likes the sound of their own voice?!), my favorite part of preparing for it was the research I did on why it is SO important for women to protect their most precious resource: their time. So many things are vying for our time each day, both personally and professionally, that it is easy at the end of the day to realize that we saved no time for ourselves. There are tactical tools for how to change that going forward in here – it’s a good one!