Category: Business

Remote work success

Remote worker, like a lamp in the darkness

The global pandemic induced a mass workplace migration. Many office inhabitants were thrown into the wild remote working paradise. The expected decrease in Covid-19 case numbers will see most people abandon the remote working paradise, but for some, the distributed work environment is here to stay. I’m writing this guide for those who will become permanent remote workers.

I have worked remotely for over 7 years and still find both glorious and challenging. Along with flexibility and control, remote work requires great discipline and support.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting on the pillars of remote work success. I’ll touch on inner circle support, time boundaries, self care and much more. If you are interested in learning more about remote work and other related topics please subscribe below.

This is the list of topics I’ll blog about in the coming weeks. I’ll update the titles with links to the posts as I publish them.

1 – Success with your support network

Update: After thinking through these topic, I realised that I don’t have much more to say beyond the titles. So here they are. Consider them and make sure you do some of these things.

2 – Time boundaries

3 – Find a dedicated space

4 – Remove Distractions

5 – Structure every day

6 – Take great breaks.

7 – Get out and away for remote work success.

8 – Work hard on yourself .

9 – Look after yourself.

These topics are the pillars that have helped me over the years and I’m sure it will guide you in figuring out how to succeed in a remote working environment.

My notes from the talk on how to maximise success

Carla Harris, Vice Chairman of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, explains exactly how she got ahead in a male dominated industry.

Here’s what stood out for me:

  1. Your authenticity is your advantage.
  2. There are two currencies when it comes to success. 1 Is performance currency and 2, relationship currency. You need both to succeed, but only relationship currency get’s you to the pinnacle.
  3. She pointed out how doubtful some people are. She learned a thing from her white male colleagues. They were “frequently wrong, but never in doubt”, in other words they had confidence all the time.
  4. Perception is realities’ cop-pilot. What people perceive you to be is often how they think you actually are. You need to make sure that you make it easy for people to perceive in the same good way you do yourself. You can train others on what they should think about you. How should people describe you when you’re not in the room?
  5. If you offer that which is not valuable you will not get any reward for it.

Watch the video below

In case the video fails to show, heres the link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yflSZODY6YU

Remote spelled out is TRUST

2 planes in tandem with people performing stunt on top of them.

Bright and I had a very interesting chat about remote work, because of the COVID-19 lockdown situation in South Africa, they were thrown deep into the weirdness of distributed work.

Our conversation started with a simple question: “How do you know if someone is actually working when you can’t see them ?”. Most in-office manager’s who are used to making the connection between seeing and believing, must be thinking this at some point.

I thought about it for a moment and realised that we do not think about new hires like this at Automattic.

New hires are given full trust. They get access to all the systems, all decisions for the past 15 years, all the user data their role requires and the full faith in their ability to do what’s required to move the business forward.

My very first remote manager, Michael Krapf, had a saying that went something like this: “A good trend means a good worker, and a bad trend means a bad worker”. You could interpret it as; we should not evaluate people on an instance by instance basis, but should rather keep in mind what they do over a period of time and evaluate that.

In a work setting, low trust relationships are normally created when people don’t do what they say they were going to do. This doesn’t mean that we expect someone to be perfect, it’s just means that there is an expectation of progress, and obstacles being communicate in a timely and transparent manner.

When you have a low trust relationship, you will have to shorten the feedback periods considerably. This evaluation period should be well understood by all involved. The aim here should be to grow trust, not to have continuous checkups that puts only one side of the relationship at ease.

When trust grows, so should the evaluation period. In fact, you should expect trust to grow so much that there is no evaluation period. This is the peak of trust, all involved respects each other so much that, no news is good news and transparent communication is the natural outflow of progress.

Trust is also the basis of collaboration and collaboration the basis of a forward moving team. So start with high trust and work forward from there.

Featured Image by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

WooCommerce Payments now in Beta

I’m excited to share that our team has just released the beta version of a Payments service powered by WooCommerce, WooCommerce Payments.

Users of this gateway will be able to manage all payment related tasks, without leaving the the WooCommerce admin interface. We hope to roll out more features and support for more countries in the future, but for now we celebrate this milestone.

It was really great to join an amazing team as we wrapped up the final bits of this product, Kudos to all involved.

Now the real work begins and I’m excited to see the types of businesses that will benefit from this experience,

Take a look at all it can do for you here: https://woocommerce.com/payments/

The plugin is now available on the WordPress.org repository: https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-payments/

Outstanding Advice from a tribe of mentors

This will be my final post covering tribe of mentors. If you are a little bit lost and not sure which direction to take you will find a lot of great advice and pointers from this book. It is a great reference book and I’d recommend it to all.

In a previous post, I wrote a quick review on the book Tribe of Mentors but I also wanted to give you some of the advice that stood out to me.

1- Personal Development and Routine

Discipline = Freedom. We are always between freedom and bondage. We move away from freedom when we lack discipline. Freedom to choose the life you want comes only by discipline. There are extreme cases where one really can’t choose, but for the average person, this is a fortunate choice to have.

To become the best you, you must work on your own weaknesses continuously.

2 – Learning

The best student wins. Make sure that you are a life long student, make sure you grow to become the best student.

All successful people read a lot. An example is Terry Cruise. He is a man of great depth who has an incredible reading list. You would think that comedians are just naturally good at telling stories that make people laugh. Now I know why some comedians make it in life: they read! See Trevor Noah’s favorite books as an example: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/t-magazine/entertainment/trevor-noah-favorite-books-list.html

Be in a hurry to learn, not to get validation. Embrace change and keep learning, the only way to stay relevant.

We arrive at certain destinations because of our decisions. Our choices are mostly a result of how we weighed our options. From Julia Galef’s interview, I learned that most advice is one size fits all but that the best advice helps one improve judgment.

Tom Peters stated, “The number one failings of CEOs: they don’t read enough”. I was so inspired by how much the mentors read and how many of them actually made time for reading in their schedule. Reading is absolutely critical. You can not avoid this if you desire growth. Reading is probably the most important career and life habit and is one strand that connects all the mentors. To be well prepared for all situations one must read a wide range of topics, even poetry.

3- Health.

In pursuit of success, you can’t ignore your health.  Resting is important, simply put: Uptime is as important as downtime and growth come from periods of rest.

Even if you don’t exercise you should at least make time to walk. Make it part of your life. Walk a little.

Eating healthy is critical and sugar is toxic. Avoid sugar especially soda and juice.

The important things in life must be done in parallel: relationships, health, religion, work.

4 – Success

No success came overnight. Even if that is what the media would like you to believe.

It is possible to out-prepare any competition.

To future proof yourself, focus on personal resilience and emotional intelligence.

Choose opportunities based on the people you get to work with. Skate to where the puck is going and remember persistence is greater than talent.

To reach success Tom Peters said: Become a superstar, all-pro listener, read up on it, work on it, have a mentor grade you on it.

Beware the “philosophologist”. Beware the one who has not been in the trenches. Seek wisdom from people who’ve done it, not the people who teach it.

5- People

On saying no: Have a yes list, for everything else say no.

Saying maybe, when you want to say no, is lying to yourself and others.

Say no to complaints, blame, and gossip.

Don’t underestimate languages. It is the doorway to another world.

There is so much to gain from being generous. Generosity elevates us all.

Avoid ego and embrace truth. Ego’s focus is: who is right. Truth focuses on what is right.

6 – Attitude and Personal Philosophy

Have a Gratitude Journal, write in it and read it. This gives you perspective.

Self-esteem, the reputation you have with yourself. Do not do things that erode that reputation.

Confidence is overrated and even irritating -try Courage. As you take courage and build up a track record of success, with yourself, genuine confidence grows.

Other Posts you may like:

    Giving Advice Doesn’t Work, I found a better way

    I was recently chatting to a friend. He mentioned some area where he was not succeeding . I had the perfect answer. If he’d only follow my advice.

    I make this mistake all too often. I can see it in people’s response. They fell insulted or just irritated that I would try to give advice. I do it sincerely but it always backfires.

    I realized that Giving People Advice Rarely Works.

    I found this helpful, maybe you will too
    — Read on www.google.co.za/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/201407/giving-people-advice-rarely-works-does?amp

    The most gifted books from the tribe of mentors

    I read Tribe of Mentors, a year ago, and wrote down all the recommended books. I made notes on these books as I wanted to see if there are commonalities between the things highly successful people read. To no surprise, I found that many of the mentors recommended the same books.

    I thought it would be helpful to create a list of the top ten recommended books. This list is in order of most occurrences and according to my naive method for counting and making notes.

    Continue reading “The most gifted books from the tribe of mentors” →