Tag: The new rules

Let’s face it: even post-Covid pandemic, remote work is going to be the reality for many if not most of us. In their article, “Reimagining the office and work life after COVID-19”, McKinsey found that early this April, 62 percent of employed Americans worked at home during the crisis, compared with about 25 percent a couple of years ago. While there’s no replacing in-person engagement, today’s technology tools and platforms have transformed our ability to be productive in highly dispersed teams.

We at illume hire have pulled together our list of top tools you should be familiar with to maximize your productivity as a remote worker. We broke the list out by category.

Online Meetings

Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way: Zoom. While Zoom recently suffered an embarrassing outage, they remain the 800-lb gorilla in online meeting platforms, but Microsoft Teams is nipping at Zoom’s heals (maybe more like full-on biting), and Google is trying to keep pace with its Google Meet offering. Zoom offers a free version that’s limited to 40-minute meetings with a max of 100 attendees. Microsoft Teams and Google Meet also include free and paid versions rolled into Microsoft 365 and G Suite respectively.

Calendar and Scheduling

Look beyond the basics of Google Calendar or Outlook to get your time and meeting management game in tip-top shape. For those of us who struggle with the cat-herding exercise that is finding meeting times across team members, customers, and timezones, enter Doodle. Doodle excels at reducing time and endless email threads when trying to find a time that works for a meeting across multiple calendars. Using polls, Doodle enables you to offer slots and quickly zero in on the best option for your meeting invitees. Doodle has both free and paid versions and is a major time saver.

Another great app is Calendly, which flips the script on meeting scheduling, and allows your invites to find the best time based on timeslots that you designate. Calendly’s secret sauce lies in its rules that help you set up one-on-one, round-robin, and collective availability meetings.

Team Collaboration and Communication

If you aren’t familiar with Slack by now, it’s time to get acquainted with this top team collaboration platform. You’ll see Slack widely used on publicly accessible sites and within internal teams alike. Its simple concept is the ability to set up “Channels” which can focus on an entire project, or you can set up multiple channels for collaboration on different aspects of a more complex project. Slack has extensive points of integration with pretty much every tool out there, and using their bots enables you to automate everything from auto-responses for customer inquiries to triggering meetings based on a simple slack message.

Another great tool is Trello, from productivity powerhouse, Atlassian. Trello follows the kanban methodology, using the simple concept of cards, lists, and boards to empower individuals and teams to manage everything from the simple to more complex projects. It has a great mobile app, a desktop client, and a web interface. 

Password Management

While managing passwords may not be top-of-mind when you think about productivity in a remote work environment, it should be. With all the different tools you’re using, and with an increased need to have highly secure passwords (which typically means longer, less predictable passwords), having a great password manager can save you a lot of time and headache when you can’t remember your login for a specific tool or service. 

Our favorite password manager is LastPass. Like most services, it offers a free and paid version. The free version gives you a great, basic password management tool, and the paid version at just $3 per month allows you to manage more complex multi-factor authentication scenarios.

Note Taking

While we each have our own approach to note-taking, from sticky notes to napkins to Word documents, there’s one tool that rises to the top for us: Evernote. Evernote is the elder statesman of note-taking apps, but don’t let that long history fool you: this is a power-packed app. Beyond what you’d expect in terms of creating notebooks, adding tags for easy filtering, and syncing across all your devices, Evernote has excellent integration with a variety of tools like Gmail, browsers for web clipping, and both Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Even if you don’t run out (virtually of course) and sign up for any of these offerings, we recommend you check them out to make sure you’re familiar with them and ready to talk about how they could fit in remote teams’ lives during your next interview. Most of the services we mentioned above have thorough tutorials on their sites and we always recommend you check out YouTube where there is well-produced, free content to help you get started with each service.

Whether you’re looking for a new job, looking for that next promotion, or getting ready to launch your own business, success in the digital age requires a learning-for-life mindset and a willingness to embrace new ways of doing things. Enter upskilling.

Upskilling is all about refreshing your existing skills, learning new competencies, and proving to your current or future employers that you are engaged and ready to learn and apply new ways of doing things. 

To help you explore opportunities to begin your upskilling journey, here is a list of top online resources:

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When Transamerica asked: “Have you taken any steps to ensure that you’ll be able to continue working past 65 or in retirement, if needed?” only 37% of boomers said they’ve been keeping their job skills up to date. And that was down from 40% when Transamerica surveyed boomers in 2019. Those percentages were flipped for Gen Xers, who’ve been taking a little more initiative lately. 

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1. ALISON

ALISON has a wide range of free, comprehensive classes on topics ranging from technology, languages, science, financial literacy, personal and soft skills, and entrepreneurship. It targets all kinds of learners, from professionals and managers to teachers and freelancers.

2. Udemy

Udemy has plenty to offer for the learner on a budget, from completely free courses taught by experts, professors, entrepreneurs, and professionals, to frequent discounts and class specials. In addition to classes in tech, business, and marketing, you can also explore options in productivity, health, hobbies, and lifestyle.

3. LinkedIn Learning

Formerly known as Lynda.com, LinkedIn Learning gives you access to thousands of courses in business, design, art, education, and tech. It also offers a free one-month trial so you can try before you buy.

4. Coursera

If you want to receive a college education without the high cost of tuition, Coursera is the best stop. This website offers amazing courses in all kinds of fields, from professional development to psychology, history, and literature—all created and taught by professors at top institutions nationally and across the globe. Their universities include Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and plenty more.

5. Udacity

Udacity focuses on software development, offering free courses in programming, data science, and web development. The website also offers a nanodegree program for individuals who want to master a skill set or pursue a full-time career in tech.

Reviewed and Recommended: TED - Daniel Pink, The Puzzle of Motivation

Daniel Pink is a NYT bestselling author and writes about business and human behavior. In 2009, just after the 2008 crash, he gave a TED talk discussing the disconnect between scientific facts about what truly motivates people and the way business is typically conducted.  

His sense of urgency to help businesses transcend the financial crisis is timely given the situation in 2020.  He wants executives to realize these three elements could change everything for an employee and that it’s all based in science. If you’ve ever been in an unhappy work environment, it’s likely these critical elements weren’t being met in your work life.   

The three primary areas that motivate people in the workplace:

1. Autonomy – The urge to direct your own life
2. Mastery – Desire to get better and better
3. Purpose – Work on something important, something that matters

Your digital footprint is critical when you’re searching for a job. Recruiters and hiring managers likely will search you online - both to confirm your credentials and get a glimpse of your identity beyond how you present yourself during interviews. In fact, many employers have moved past the resume, and don’t put any weight on this historical staple of the job application process.

Linkedln:

A LinkedIn account is a living, breathing extension of your resume and a key networking tool. Think of it as your own branding tool. It’s also the main search tool for hiring managers and recruiters to find people with the skills and experience they desire.

 Here are a few ways to leverage the existing tools and information in LinkedIn:

1. Follow the companies, CEOs, and senior leadership of the companies where you’d like to work someday. They will often post new open positions on LinkedIn as well. You can also set up alerts within LinkedIn when positions at your targeted companies become available. Not only is this a way to stay on top of new job openings, but you’ll get notified about new articles posted by the company and its leader, a great way to stay on top of what’s important to their business. 
2. Publish your own articles on LinkedIn, writing about something of interest and topical in your field to build credibility and your image as a thought leader in your industry. Tag people and groups you want to engage and add hashtags to maximize your post’s reach. Pro-tip: Posting between Tuesday and Thursday, either early in the morning, lunchtime or early evening, as well as 10am and 11am on Tuesday are when LI users are most engaged (according to Hubspot research). 
3. Join LinkedIn groups within your professional field, your educational institutions, or other professional networking groups. 
4. Ensure your LinkedIn profile contains keywords that will match the job descriptions of desired roles, since LinkedIn recruiting tools match profiles to job postings based, in part, on keywords identified by recruiters for the specific roles they seek to fill. 
5. Seek endorsements and recommendations from past and present colleagues to demonstrate your leadership qualities and strengths. Choose wisely on who you ask, since you surely will be asked to reciprocate. 

Create a Landing Page 

A landing page is a single-page website. If it’s done well, it can generate topic discussions during your interview or can even help you get the interview in the first place. When you create your own page, post it on your LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, and anywhere else you have a digital account. It's not as daunting as it sounds and will set you apart since not many people take advantage of free landing pages (especially mid-career professionals). It’s one more tool to create the desired profile you want online. Not only does a landing page add more personality to who you are, but it also provides context. If you’ve engaged in personal or charitable pursuits that highlight your skills, add those too. As an example, “conceived, planned, and executed the first annual fundraiser walk for the Melanoma Foundation in my community after a neighbor succumbed to the disease, which has continued annually for 8 years and raised over $500k for cancer research.“ That information illustrates leadership, perseverance, empathy, compassion, organization, and the ability to bring others along to achieve a common and worthy goal.

Additionally, you could include an area on your landing page called "Self Improvement" where you could list favorite TED Talks or business book reviews with top takeaways from each. Consider things that provide an additional layer to who you are, what you’re interested in, and how that could be valuable to an organization.

Here are a few companies that offer free landing pages.

Wix: They have a free basic version with plenty of different templates to choose from and that are easy  to use.  The price for paid versions ranges from $13 to $500 per month. The Combo plan is the cheapest at $13 per month, and gives you an ad-free site. The $17 per month Unlimited plan is best for freelancers.

Site123: I was able to set up a basic website in 30 minutes.  Very user friendly.  The upgrade (if you want to pay for it) includes your own domain name for $142 per year.  If you choose not to pay for a domain name, your URL risks looking a bit spammy but that is what you get for using this free tool.

A Word About Resumes:

Some would argue that resumes aren't being used much anymore because if you have LinkedIn, why duplicate it? However, many companies still ask for one.  A well-written resume is a living document and it should always change according to the role you are applying for at that moment. Keep it up to date.  Before you send it to an employer, have a few friends look it over.  You can find plenty of modern templates online through websites such as Canva and Resumonk. These are super easy to use and you can save it to pdf easily.  Taking care to create a more modern looking resume illustrates you keep up on trends.  

If you don't hear back from the company even if you feel like you are a "perfect fit", send a kind follow up.  Keep on connecting with others, building your network and relationships, and believe in yourself.  It will happen.